Sparklines are "simple, wordlike graphics" that illustrate data points clearly as images. Larry Ogrodnek has written Sparklines for Java, a servlet and taglib that generate sparklines and made it available. It's released under the Apache license. Usage is fairly simple; it's not a full graph package, but also has far less overhead than a graphing package would. It can also be used directly from Java code, in case you have little interest in the servlet or JSP tag library.

looks interesting, nice idea

How about adding pie charts.

A few months back I wrote a blog entry on the usage of sparklines for metric monitoring in our product. Beautiful Evidence: Metric Monitoring We have had sparkline like graphics embedded in tables and trees UI components since the early days of the product - prior to the publication of Edwards new book that includes a whole chapter on this subject. His 4 books on information visualization and required reading here. regards, William Louth JXInsight Product Architect JInspired

I wonder if it's possible to put legends on Sparkline-produced charts. Does anybody see any difference between Sparkline and JFreeChart beside the one that JFreeChart doesn't provide a servlet and a tag library?

I haven't checked out sparkline yet (scheduled for the weekend) but I've used cewolf (http://cewolf.sourceforge.net/new/index.html) which is based on JFreeChart and provides a servlet & taglib. -Senthil

Yeh i have seeen tht its awsome Cewolf can be used inside a Servlet/JSP based web application to embed complex graphical charts of all kinds its really good and open source toooo

JFreeChart does have utilities that allow it to be used very easily from inside of a servlet. //write a JFreeChart chart to response response.setContentType( "image/png" ) ; ChartUtilities.writeChartAsPNG( response.getOutputStream(), chart, width, height ) ; That said, Sparklines does look really useful and certainly easier to use.