Fins - Introduction

Introduction

Overview

Fins is an open-source project whose goal is to provide the capability to make charts in Cocoon. The idea is to take a chart description in XML and render it in both vector (SVG) and raster (JPEG, PNG) formats. To fulfill this task, the JFreeChart library was chosen as the one to base this effort. Hence, Fins may be described as an XML wrapper around some (eventually all) JFreeChart capabilities. By the way, we like to thank the JFreeChart team for making such a fine piece of software.

Supported Cocoon versions

Fins is now targeting Cocoon 2.2, but, with a few changes, it works with Cocoon 2.1 as well (see the relevant FAQ entry).

Components

Fins is composed by a few Java classes, implementing the following Cocoon components:

JFCTransformer This component makes a chart using the SVG vector format that may be further processed by other pipeline stages. This transformer is slower than the serializer, but has the added option of writing to the file system an optional image in JPEG or PNG, which may become handy for persistent caching.
JFCSerializer This component makes a chart in either PNG or JPEG raster formats, and it is faster than the transformer.

All above components use the same XML input format Current version

However, since JFreeChart is licensed under the LGPL particular care must be exercised no to break the JFreeChart license.

Upgrade from 0.x to 1.0

Regretfully, previous Fins XML documents will not work with Fins 1.0.

Features

Fins enables you to make business charts out of Cocoon, with the help of JFreeChart library. Its main features are:

Choice of vector or raster output.
Chart styles (font, colors, etc.) can be shared amongst charts.
Easy chart definition using XML.

Screenshots

Here some examples of the charts you can produce: