Book Image

Learning Highcharts

Book Image

Learning Highcharts

Overview of this book

Highcharts is a popular web charting software that produces stunning and smooth animated JavaScript and HTML5 SVG graphs. It is among the leading web charting software in the market and has been used in many different sectors ó from financial to social websites. Although it is built on top of jQuery, it is so simple to construct that you need little programming skill to create a simple web chart. Highcharts works on all modern browsers and is solely based on native browser technologies and doesn't require client side plugins like Flash or Java."Learning Highcharts" is a comprehensive tutorial with clear and practical examples. This book follows a step by step approach towards making artistic, presentable, or professional style charts and other types of charts that you won't find elsewhere. It also shows you how to integrate Highcharts with other popular frameworks, such as jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and ExtJS and even how to run it on the server side.The book starts off with an introduction to Highcharts and demonstrates usage of its rich set of options. This is followed by an introduction to each type of basic chart, beginning with simple illustrations and ending with more artistic and productive additions to the charts. The book then guides you how to use the Highcharts API and events handling which are important to build interactive applications. It then goes on to show you how to apply Highcharts onto a popular AJAX Framework or even jQuery, jQuery Mobile and Ext JS. Finally the book shows readers how to set up Highcharts running on server side. "Learning Highcharts" aims to teach you everything you need to know about Highcharts, and take the advanced leap from Flash to JavaScript, with this extremely productive and effective Charting software available, thus helping you build basic charts and even multiple series and axes charts. The book also shows you the flexibility of Highcharts and how to create other special charts. The programming side of APIs and event handling will benefit the readers in building advanced web applications with Highcharts. The book also guides readers on how to integrate Highcharts with popular frameworks such as jQuery Mobile and Ext JS. By the end of the book, you should be able to use Highcharts to suit your web page or application needs.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Highcharts
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Plotting a speedometer gauge chart


Gauge charts have a very different structure compared to other Highcharts graphs. For instance, the backbone of gauge charts is made up of a "pane". A pane is a circular plot area for laying out chart content. We can adjust the size, position, and the backgrounds of the pane. Once a pane is laid out, we can then put the axis on top of it. Highcharts supports multiple panes within a chart, hence we can display multiple gauges (that is multiple gauge series) within a chart. A gauge series is composed of two specific components—a pivot and a dial.

Another distinct difference in gauge charts is that the series is actually one dimensional data, that is a single value. Hence there is one axis, the y axis, used in this type of chart. The yAxis properties are used the same way as other series type charts which can be on a linear, datetime, or logarithmic scale, and it also responds to the tickInterval option and so on.

Plotting a twin dials chart – a Fiat 500...