Creating a data visualization/analytics dashboard in Java

Question

I'm developing a website where I need to show a dashboard with data from the backend. The data visualization look and feel needs to be like Google Analytics dashboard.

I'm wondering if there's any free API/library/project that lets me do it. Also the project is in Java (SpringMVC).

Any guidance /help is appreciated. Thanks a lot.

Solution

Given Google analytics layout, I would suggest you to use Twitter bootstrap because :

• you will be at ease for managing grid layout given the mechanics of twitter bootstrap
• you can have a UI quick fastly with the default css (and then customize css depending on the need),
• you will have a portable CSS for responsive design (I suspect that in the case of such a monitoring tool, when your users will be statisfy with a classic desktop browser version, they'll call for a tablet or smartphone versions that you would already have :-))

Twitter bootstrap : http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

As for the data visualization, I strongly encourage you to go for d3.js (http://d3js.org/), because you can generate a wide and clean variety of graphs (see examples: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery).

You can start by looking at SpringMVC and bootstrap examples provided at : https://github.com/priyatam/springmvc-twitterbootstrap-showcase

Comments

[LittleLebowski]

Thanks a lot @Fafhrd, the d3js looks awesome...the project seem to cover basic graphs to some weird variety of graphs. Wow..although the graphs are not as awesome as GA, let me dig into it to see if I can make it look better. Any other reference you want to share. Thanks a lot.

[Fafhrd]

Well, I think d3 produces nice data viz. However, it is a bit tricky dive into its logic, and once you got, it is much understandable. If you want more pointers, you can have a look at an old discussion at 6recisions : sixrevisions.com/javascript/…

[LittleLebowski]

I finally chose two libraries viz. Flot Charts and jqPlot. I decided to go ahead with Flot. Thanks for your suggestions.