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Eclipse SWTChart
Charts are an important part of modern applications. The visualization of data has become a vital part, especially in the area of data science. Java as a technology allows to create charts. But its handling is tedious, that why toolkits like AWT, Swing, SWT or JavaFX have been developed to display graphical elements easily. Depending on the aforementioned technologies, specialized libraries to display graphs and time series have entered the scene. One of those is SWTChart [1], which has a well defined API and allows to create line, bar and scatter charts easily. The next enhancement of SWTChart is already developed under the hood of Eclipse as part of the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project (EAVP) [2]. It allows to create customized charts, to define several axes and to offer several export options.
- Line Charts (time series, etc.)
- Bar Charts (histograms, etc.)
- Scatter Charts (value distributions, etc.)
Instead of having two repositories for SWTChart and its extensions, it would make sense to combine both into one repository. People would benefit from a consolidated development by making the use of both libraries even easier.
[1] http://www.swtchart.org
[2] https://github.com/eclipse/eavp/tree/chemclipse/org.eclipse.eavp.service.swtchart
Eclipse SWTChart provides the means to create rich, flexible and interactive data visualizations natively in SWT.
Eclipse SWTChart allows to create different types of charts. The API is well designed and allows to create Line, Bar and Scatter charts easily. Size, colors, axes, ranges and all aspects of the charts can be modified via code. So, it's easy to create customized charts. Moreover, the library already contains a data compression to show large data sets in a performant way. In addition to that, charts can be created even more easily with the SWTChart extensions. It uses the convention over configuration pattern and offers many additional improvements to scale axes of different type automatically or to select specific data ranges.
Figure 1 – SWTChart
Figure 2 – SWTChart Extensions
Figure 3 – SWTChart Extensions - Default Theme
Figure 4 – SWTChart Extensions - Dark Theme
The Eclipse Foundation is the right place to collaborate for SWTChart because of its many users, the vivid community and the Science Working Group. The Eclipse Foundation in general and the Science Working Group in particular offers great opportunities to collaborate with other projects and to find new ways for the data evaluation. The migration to the Eclipse Foundation will help SWTChart grow its open source community and makes its usage more secure due to the strong IP review process of the Eclipse Foundation. An integration into the Science Working Group helps also to adopt SWTChart more easily by its members and technologies. Why shouldn't SWTChart be merged into the existing Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project (EAVP)? SWTChart has a long history and is well known in the community. That's why the project identity should be preserved. Moreover, EAVP offers a high-level platform to offer services for various types of charts. SWTChart is a base library, which could be consumed by EAVP. A well defined separation of concerns is seen as highly beneficial in this case.
Yoshitaka has created the project SWTChart. He is the project owner.
Philip Wenig has created the SWTChart extensions, already managed by Eclipse via the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project (EAVP).
There are no obvious legal issues with the code in the opinion of the author. The software has been designed and developed by the author(s). It contains no code licensed under the GPL, LGPL or AGPL.
The initial contribution will be made in quarter three of 2018 and the first release will happen by the end of quarter two of 2019.
Implementation of:
- Additional export converters, e.g. SVG, PDF and EPS
- Improvements of the axis handling, e.g. a reversed axis scale
- Improvements of the performance by compression algorithms when handling huge data sets
- Fix SWTChart issues under Mac OS