Why use a Java Applet?

There are several ways to publish high-quality charts on the Internet. The various picture formats can be quite effective, but are heavy on transmission time and can lose precision. VML is ideal if your users all have a Microsoft platform and a modern browser; however the VML code is also quite verbose. The advantage of using a Java viewer here is that it only needs downloading once, and from then on the charts are defined by a very terse vector specification. The viewer is approximately 80k, and a typical chart is around 3k when packaged as applet parameters.

The examples included here show the same charts as are used for the VML examples - you might like to compare byte-count and rendering quality. Currently the viewer does not support rotated text (not shown at all), broken lines (shown solid) or hatched fills (filled as half-tone).