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* JFREECHART: Version 1.0.8a *
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6 December 2007
(C)opyright 2000-2007, by Object Refinery Limited and Contributors.
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1. INTRODUCTION
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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.
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2. LATEST VERSION
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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.
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3. DOCUMENTATION
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You can download installation instructions
(jfreechart-1.0.8-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.
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4. DEPENDENCIES
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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 1.0.12)
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.
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5. SUPPORT
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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
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6. ANT BUILD SCRIPT
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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.
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7. THE DEMO APPLICATION
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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-1.0.8-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/
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8. LIMITATIONS
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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.
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9. GNU CLASSPATH
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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.
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10. WHAT's NEW
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A list of changes in recent versions:
1.0.8a: (06-Dec-2007)
- a special bug fix release to address security issues in the HTML
image map generation code.
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 description of the
changes in this release.
1.0.5 : (23-Mar-2007)
- this release contains a new DeviationRenderer, enhancements to a
number of existing classes and numerous bug fixes, see the NEWS