Chapter 15. Highcharts Online Services and Plugins

In the previous chapter, you learned how to run Highcharts on the server side. This enables Highcharts to expand its reach to online services. We will visit these services in this chapter and explore what benefits we can gain from them. As well as that, we examine how we can extend Highcharts with plugins. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What service export.highcharts.com provides

• A step-by-step exercise to create an online chart from the new cloud service—cloud.highcharts.com

• What a Highcharts plugin is

• Two plugin examples – regression and draggable points

• Creating a new user experience by interoperating both plugins

• How to write a plugin – extend existing methods, export a new method, and handle events

Highcharts export server – export.highcharts.com

In the last chapter, we looked into running Highcharts on the server side. However, some users may not want to set up their own server operations. This is where export.highcharts.com comes in. Originally, it was only set up for the exporting module so that users running Highcharts on the Internet could export their charts freely. Later, the URL was expanded to support online services. This let users enter their own Highcharts configuration and download the resulting chart images.

The following is part of the export.highcharts.com web page:

As we can see, the user input indeed corresponds to the parameters of the server-side script, highcharts_convert.js, which we covered in a previous chapter. Both the web interface and server process are implemented in Java, which deliver the user's options to the PhantomJS/highcharts_convert.js process and exports it into SVG. Once the Java server receives the SVG result, it launches Batik to format into...

Highcharts Cloud Service

In this section, we will review a brand new online chart service developed by the Highcharts team, Highcharts Cloud Service (http://cloud.highcharts.com). The following screenshot shows the initial welcome screen:

Highcharts Cloud Service is a major milestone in terms of expanding the product line. It is designed for users to:

• Create HTML5 charts even without any JavaScript or Highcharts knowledge (in SIMPLE mode)

• Prototype their charts interactively without any installation and setting up on the web server and Highcharts

• Embed charts in online articles, applications, or web pages with a simple hyperlink

• Store their charts in the cloud rather than locally

• Share their charts easily with other people

The following is a screenshot of a news website linking a chart created from the cloud service:

Let's try to create our first chart using the cloud service. The web interface is wizard-based and intuitive for any non-technical users. The following is the initial screen of the...

Highcharts plugins

Highcharts can be extended through plugins that allow us to add functionality without disturbing the core layer of code and are easy to share. There is a library of plugins available online contributed by Highcharts staff and other users at http://www.highcharts.com/plugin-registry. One distinct advantage of developing features out of plugins is that we can pick and choose the plugin features and build a compressed JavaScript library from them. In fact, we can already do something similar with the Highcharts library on the download page.

In this section, we will take a tour of a couple of plugins that you may find handy.

The regression plot plugin

When we create a scatter plot with lots of data points, it is often worthwhile to overlay them with a regression line. Of course, we can always achieve this by adding a line series manually. However, we still need to write the code for regression analysis. It is much more convenient to include a plugin. The Highcharts regression...

Summary

In this chapter, we visited the Highcharts online export server and the new cloud service. We took a short tour of the cloud service and demonstrated how we can create a chart online without any prior knowledge of JavaScript and Highcharts. Another topic covered was the Highcharts plugin in which we experimented with two plugins: regression and draggable data points. We then demonstrated how to modify one plugin to make both plugins work together to provide a new user experience.

So far, all my knowledge and experience of Highcharts is enclosed in this journal. To achieve two editions in 3 years has been much tougher than I expected. Hence, my journey with Highcharts has come to an end, and I can put my time back to where it should always be, family. My utmost gratitude to you for purchasing and reading this book. My goal was to illustrate to you how dynamic and impressive Highcharts can be, and I hope I have achieved this and ended this book on a high note.