Book Image

Highcharts Cookbook

By : Nicholas Terwoord
Book Image

Highcharts Cookbook

By: Nicholas Terwoord

Overview of this book

<p>Highcharts is a JavaScript library that enables web developers to create a wide range of different, highly customized charts. Highcharts easily integrates with existing JavaScript frameworks and is simple enough to make a column chart in a few lines of code, but flexible enough to handle more complex charting scenarios such as viewing multiple chart types with different data sources on a multitude of devices and form-factors.</p> <p>"Highcharts Cookbook" is a practical guide that provides you with clear, step-by-step recipes to create dynamic, functional charts in your web applications using Highcharts. With "Highcharts Cookbook", you will create and design dynamic and versatile charts in different scenarios.</p> <p>"Highcharts Cookbook" through its wide array of recipes will walk you through everything you need to know about Highcharts and will enable you to unleash its full potential in your web applications quickly and easily.</p> <p>You will learn how to integrate Highcharts with different frontend and backend libraries such as ExtJS, jQuery, and the Yii framework with some examples in Python, PHP, and NodeJS. You will also cover how to handle user interactions like form input and mouse events, how to fetch remote data in CSV, XML, and JSON format, and how to render charts for offline usage. If you want to learn the different ways you can leverage the power of Highcharts to create, integrate and extend its features in your application, then this book is for you.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Highcharts Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using WebSockets for real-time updates


Using AJAX for chart updates, as done in the last recipe, is helpful but may lead to a lot of unnecessary calls to whichever backend service is providing the data. Also, regardless of whether there is new data, we will have to ask for it every three seconds (or whichever interval we've configured). One alternative to this is to use WebSockets, which allows us to receive updates as soon as the server has updates.

For this recipe, we will be using Tornado, a python library that is available at http://www.tornadoweb.org, to provide the server-side component for our chart, but the client-side code will be similar for any server-side component that provides the WebSockets connectivity.

Note

While WebSockets is gaining support in many, if not the most modern, browsers—at the time of writing—they are not supported in all browsers or may experience some unusual behavior in certain network configurations. For this reason, please be aware of the limitations of your...