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Visualization at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo
As LinuxWorld Conference and Expo approaches, presenter George Belotsky explains what you'll learn from his talk, "Visualizing the Enterprise."
You have often heard that "a picture is worth a thousand words". This is especially true in the modern enterprise. Customers, investors and employees all must have access to relevant, easy-to-understand information. Thus, charts and graphs of various kinds are staples of the business world.
Unfortunately, creating visual representation of data is a tedious, time-consuming task -- drawing that picture can be harder than writing a thousand words. You have probably struggled with tools such as Microsoft Visio, PowerPoint and Excel (or their Open Source replacements like Dia and OpenOffice.org) to produce the graphics without which no report is complete.
What if, instead of drawing these visuals with labor-intensive desktop tools, you automatically generated them from the raw data? Surprisingly, while a picture may be worth a thousand words, it often requires less than a hundred lines of code to produce! Today, there are lots of Open Source tools available to help you automate away the drudgery of hand-created visuals.
Although many of these tools can readily generate graphics for print, it is the Web application that is their most natural home. A Web application running over the Internet or on an intranet can quickly capture the freshest data in a visual representation, and make that representation easily available to those who need it.
In this LinuxWorld talk, you will learn about the tools and techniques for Web-based generation of graphics. Here is a list of tools that we will be covering.
- JFreeChart creates standard business graphics, such as pie and Gantt charts. The tool is easy to use, and produces beautiful results.
- GD is a fast, low-level library of basic drawing routines. It has bindings for many programming languages.
- GraphViz is a powerful graph (as in graph theory) generator. GraphViz can produce "Visio-style" diagrams with hundreds of nodes -- many more than is really practical manually.
- MTASC -- a fast, Open Source Flash compiler. While Flash itself is not Open Source, MTASC is all you need to produce sophisticated, graphics-rich clients for this platform. Support for user interaction, smooth animation and sound -- all through the Web browser.
- Ajax with wz_jsgraphics. SVG is not widely available yet, but you simply cannot wait? The wz_jsgraphics package gives you a good toolset of drawing primitives -- and it works in today's browsers, with no modifications required. Just use this pure JavaScript library straight from your AJAX application.
Along the way, you will also find out about various design patterns and tradeoffs for generation of Web-based graphics. After this enjoyable tour, you will be ready to start on your own visualization projects.
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LinuxWorld Conference and Expo San Francisco, August 4-7, 2008.
Linux Plumbers Conference Portland, OR, Sept. 16-19, 2008.
FreedomHEC Santa Monica, November 8-9, 2008.