jfreechart

******************************** * JFREECHART: Version 1.0.10 * ******************************** 9 June 2008 (C)opyright 2000-2008, by Object Refinery Limited and Contributors. ----------------- 1. INTRODUCTION ----------------- JFreeChart is a free chart library for the Java(tm) platform. It runs on the Java 2 Platform (JDK 1.3 or later) and uses the Java 2D API for drawing. JFreeChart is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL). A copy of the licence is included in the distribution. Please note that JFreeChart is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Please refer to the licence for details. ------------------- 2. LATEST VERSION ------------------- The latest version of this class library can be obtained from: http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/ If you have an comments, suggestions or bugs to report, please post a message in the JFreeChart forum. ----------------- 3. DOCUMENTATION ----------------- You can download installation instructions (jfreechart-1.0.10-install.pdf) from the JFreeChart home page or the project page on SourceForge. Further documentation for JFreeChart (the JFreeChart Developer Guide) is available to purchase from by Object Refinery Limited, a company owned and operated by David Gilbert (the original author of JFreeChart). For more information, please see: http://www.object-refinery.com/jfreechart/guide.html Sales of the JFreeChart Developer Guide are an important source of funding for the project. Please help us to continue developing free software. API documentation files in HTML format are available on-line. If you wish to keep a local copy of the API files, you can regenerate them directly from the source code. You can do this using the 'javadoc' or 'gjdoc' utilities directly, or with the Ant script (build.xml) included in the distribution. ----------------- 4. DEPENDENCIES ----------------- JFreeChart has the following dependencies: (a) JDK 1.3.1 or higher - JFreeChart requires the Java2D and Collections APIs, so it definitely won't work with JDK 1.1 (with a small amount of effort you can get it to compile and run with JDK 1.2). If you are using JFreeChart to create applets, this means that you cannot rely on the JVM integrated with Microsoft's Internet Explorer - your users will need to have the Java 2 plug-in installed. Most other browsers (e.g. Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror) support JRE 1.4, 1.5 or 1.6. (b) JCommon - version 1.0.0 or later. The runtime jar file (version 1.0.13) is included in the JFreeChart distribution. You can obtain the complete source code for JCommon from: http://www.jfree.org/jcommon/ JCommon is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. (c) GNU JAXP (JDK 1.3 only) - a free implementation of the standard XML processing APIs for Java. http://www.gnu.org/software/classpathx/jaxp/ Classes in the org.jfree.data.xml package require this library, or another JAXP v1.1 compliant parser. The gnujaxp.jar file (from the gnujaxp-1.0beta1.zip distribution) is included with JFreeChart. GNU JAXP is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License with an additional library exception. THIS LIBRARY IS ONLY REQUIRED BY JFREECHART IF YOU ARE USING JDK 1.3. (d) servlet.jar - classes in the org.jfree.chart.servlet package require this file. The JFreeChart distribution includes the servlet.jar file distributed with Tomcat 4.1.31. Applicable license terms are published at: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/LICENSE (e) JUnit - a unit testing framework (the junit.jar runtime file is included in the distribution). JUnit is licensed under the terms of the IBM Common Public License. You can find out more about JUnit and/or download the latest version from: http://www.junit.org The JUnit tests included with JFreeChart have been created using JUnit 4.3.1. ----------- 5. SUPPORT ----------- Support questions can be posted in the free support forum at http://www.jfree.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=3 We read all questions posted in the forum, and respond to as many as we can in the time available. Unfortunately, there are too many questions to answer them all. If you need commercial support for JFreeChart, this is offered by Object Refinery Limited: http://www.object-refinery.com/jfreechart/support.html -------------------- 6. ANT BUILD SCRIPT -------------------- An Ant build script (build.xml) is included in the distribution. This is the same script that is used to create the JFreeChart distribution. For more information about Ant: http://ant.apache.org/ Please note that you will need to obtain the servlet.jar file (see the DEPENDENCIES section above) before running the Ant script. ------------------------ 7. THE DEMO APPLICATION ------------------------ A demo application that shows a selection of the charts that can be generated is included in the JFreeChart distribution. To run the demo (using JDK 1.3.1 or later), use the following command: java -jar jfreechart-1.0.10-demo.jar The complete source code for the demo application is available for download when you purchase the JFreeChart Developer Guide. The demo application uses iText, a library for creating PDF documents. iText is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence and is available to download from: http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ --------------- 8. LIMITATIONS --------------- JFreeChart has some known limitations that will hopefully be addressed in the future: - with the XYPlot class, when the bounds of the range axis are calculated automatically, all of the data is used, not just the subset that is visible on the chart; - some renderers do not respect the series visibility flags yet; - the chart property editors (accessible by right-clicking on the chart panel) are horribly out of date and probably shouldn't be used; - item labels (if displayed) are not taken into account for the automatically calculated axis range. As a workaround, you can increase the axis margins; - tick labels on a DateAxis that uses a SegmentedTimeline can be problematic; - there is no support for writing charts to JPEG format on JDK 1.3. JPEG is not a good format for charts in any case, and it is usually better to use PNG format. If there are other items that you think should be listed here, please post a bug report. ----------------- 9. GNU CLASSPATH ----------------- GNU Classpath is a project to create a free, clean-room implementation of the standard Java(tm) class libraries: http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/ JFreeChart should work quite well with free runtimes based on GNU Classpath 0.92 or later. We are grateful to all the GNU Classpath developers that have made this possible. --------------- 10. WHAT's NEW --------------- A list of changes in recent versions: 1.0.10 : (5-May-2008) - another general maintenance release - see the NEWS and ChangeLog files for more details. 1.0.9 : (4-Jan-2008) - this release fixes a security advisory with respect to the HTML image maps generated by JFreeChart - see the NEWS file for more information. In addition, a number of bugs have been fixed. 1.0.8 : (23-Nov-2007) - primarily a bug fix release. See the NEWS and ChangeLog files for a more detailed description of the changes in this release. 1.0.7 : (14-Nov-2007) - See the NEWS and ChangeLog files for a more detailed description of the changes in this release. 1.0.6 : (15-Jun-2007) - the VectorRenderer and associated dataset classes have been promoted to the standard API from the 'experimental' source tree. See the NEWS and ChangeLog files for a more detailed descriptio