Generating Charts In Wicket Application On Google App Engine

We are in process of porting an existing Wicket application on Google App engine. This application’s charting engine used Java color classes along with Swing components to generate dynamic images. These images are then used by Wicket to display on the front-end . Unfortunately Google app engine does not support these classes. We therefore had to find an alternative to generate Charts for our application.

We decided upon using google charts in our Wicket based project. We came across this wicket google charts sub project which has the capabilities to generate charts for the application. We found out later that it used awt classes at some parts to generate charts. Looking at the code from this project we realized that it is simple to do this on our own.

Google charts require an URL format which has data along with meta information on how to display it. This well formed URL is embedded in the image tag of the rendered html content is enough to display the chart on the browser. So, in order to generate charts we had to crunch the data in the application to generate a well formed URL. Then we simply had to embed this URL in the image tag to render it on the browser. For example an URL like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350x200&chd=s:WORL&cht=bhs&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|0|5|10|15|20|25|30|35|1:|IBM|GE|TCS|SA

will generate an image like this:

Managing Multiple Parent Persistence Problem in App Engine

We are in process of porting an entire application on google app engine. This application has persistence using JPA and as usual contains mapping between entities using annotations. The mapping like @OnetoMany and @ManytoOne in Jpa may throw lot of errors in google app engine and therefore is neither straightforward nor trivial. In this blog we will see where our mapping may fail, with specific problem related to multiple parent key provider fields. Google app engine may throw this error in our application, we will see how can we manage it with unowned relationships in our application.

We have three entities User, Project and ProjectAssignment. ProjectAssignment entity has @ManyToOne mapping with an User and a Project. In these relationships we also have a bidirectional mapping using @OneToMany relationship from User and Project for ProjectAssignment.