Teechart
Encyclopedia
TeeChart is a Charting Library for programmers developed and managed by Steema Software of Girona
, Catalonia
.
It is available as commercial and non-commercial software. Borland
(later handing on the IDE business to Embarcadero Technologies
) has included a standard version of TeeChart as an integral part of the toolbox palette in most Borland Delphi
and C++ Builder
Integrated development environment
(IDEs) since 1997 and TeeChart currently forms a part of Embarcadero RAD Studio XE2. TeeChart Pro version is a commercial product that offers shareware releases for all of its formats, TeeChart.Lite for .NET is a free charting component for the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET community and TeeChart for PHP is an open-source library for PHP
environments. The TeeChart Charting Library offers Charts, Maps
and Gauge (instrument) in versions for Delphi VCL, Activex
, C Sharp (programming language) for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Java (programming language)
and PHP
. Full sourcecode has always been available for all versions except the ActiveX version. TeeChart's user interface is translated to 37 languages.
Visual Component Library
programming environment and TeeChart was first released as a shareware version and made available via Compuserve
in the same year. It was written in the first version of Delphi VCL, as a 16-bit Charting Library named TeeChart version 1. The next version of TeeChart was released as a 32-bit library (Delphi 2 supported 32-bit compilation) but was badged as TeeChart VCL v3 to coincide with Borland's naming convention for inclusion on the toolbox palette of Borland Delphi v3 in 1997 and with C++ Builder
v3 in 1998. It has been on the Delphi/C++ Builder toolbox palette ever since, current version being Embarcadero RAD Studio XE2.
TeeChart's first ActiveX
version named "version 3" too, to match the VCL version's nomenclature, was released in 1998. The version was optimised to work with Microsoft
's Visual Studio v97 and v6.0 developer suites that include Visual Basic
and Microsoft Visual C++ programming languages. Support for new programming environments followed with TeeChart's first native C# version for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET released in 2002 and TeeChart.Lite for .NET, a free charting component, released for Visual Studio.NET in 2003 and supporting too, Mono (programming). Steema Software released the first native TeeChart Java (programming language)
version in 2006 and TeeChart's first native PHP
version was released in 2009 and published as open-source in June 2010. Mobile versions of TeeChart, for Android devices and Windows Phone 7 devices were released during the first half of 2011.
, SDSS Web Services' use for charting "Scientific .. plotting of online data" at The Virtual Observatory Spectrum Services reflects that approach. The SDSS chart authors choose to represent data using TeeChart's standard 2D line display. Speed is also a factor when choosing how to most effectively plot data. Realtime data, at frequencies of up to tens or hundreds of data points or more per second, require the most processor economic approach to charting. Computer processing time dedicated to the plotting of data needs to be as lightweight as possible, freeing-up computer tasks "to achieve real-time data acquisition, display and analysis".
An important and stated aspect of many data visualisation applications is the ability to offer interactivity to the user; NASA
's document, the Orbital Debris Engineering Model ORDEM2008(Beta version), 2009, states that "The graphs may be zoomed, panned, copied to the clipboard, and exported to various file types" and Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture II, Volume 1, Daoliang, Li; Chunjiang, Zhao (2009), also using TeeChart, states "the properties at any point in the chart can be viewed moving the mouse over it". Writing about control education, Juha Lindfors states "The desired charting functionality (such as zooming and scaling) is achieved..".
Charting applications have become increasingly 'onlined', made available either to a wider public or to a territorially remote userbase via networked applications. The World wide web
(the Web) has become "by far, the most popular Internet protocol" to disseminate online applications. Most major IDEs now offer environments for web application developed aimed at browser hosted applications. Charting components, TeeChart among them, have adapted to provide models that work within a browser environment, often using static images and scripted layering techniques such as Ajax (programming)
to offer a level of interactivity, improve response times and hide apparent delay from the user. Options to enrich client, browser-side processing flexibility are exploited by TeeChart libraries via modules that offer 'micro-environments' within the browser, such as the long established ActiveX
technology, Adobe Flash
, Microsoft Silverlight or Java Applets. Serverside environments offer too, a means to interact with browser based script to dynamically respond to charting requests. Joomla and CodeIgniter are host environments for TeeChart PHP and an example of an Embarcadero IntraWeb VCL
designed application using TeeChart, is documented here.
includes a demo that uses TeeChart.Lite, called 'Self-Organizing Feature Maps (Kohonen maps)' written by Bashir Magomedovl and SourceForge
includes a Database Stress and Monitor that also uses TeeChart.Lite. For information about TeeChart support for Freepascal see TeeChart conversion status at the Free Pascal Wiki. Reference information about TeeChart for PHP use may be found at the CodeIgniter wiki pages.
Books and information sources that include substantial sections about working with the Delphi version of TeeChart include "Mastering Delphi 6" by Marco Cantù, "C++ Builder 5 developer's guide", a video Delphi Tutorial on charting JPEG compression and support forums and reference pages at TeeChart Support Forums. Non-English language document sources include, in Czech "Myslíme v jazyku Delphi 7: knihovna zkušeného programátora" by Marco Cantù, and Chinese, Delphi 6, Delphi, and Delphi 5.
Girona
Girona is a city in the northeast of Catalonia, Spain at the confluence of the rivers Ter, Onyar, Galligants and Güell, with an official population of 96,236 in January 2009. It is the capital of the province of the same name and of the comarca of the Gironès...
, Catalonia
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
.
It is available as commercial and non-commercial software. Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
(later handing on the IDE business to Embarcadero Technologies
Embarcadero Technologies
Embarcadero Technologies is an American computer software company that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services related to software through its various dynamic product divisions...
) has included a standard version of TeeChart as an integral part of the toolbox palette in most Borland Delphi
Borland Delphi
Embarcadero Delphi is an integrated development environment for console, desktop graphical, web, and mobile applications.Delphi's compilers use its own Object Pascal dialect of Pascal and generate native code for 32- and 64-bit Windows operating systems, as well as 32-bit Mac OS X and iOS...
and C++ Builder
C++ Builder
C++Builder is a rapid application development environment, developed by Borland and owned by Embarcadero Technologies, for writing programs in the C++ programming language. C++Builder combines the Visual Component Library and IDE written in Delphi with a C++ compiler...
Integrated development environment
Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...
(IDEs) since 1997 and TeeChart currently forms a part of Embarcadero RAD Studio XE2. TeeChart Pro version is a commercial product that offers shareware releases for all of its formats, TeeChart.Lite for .NET is a free charting component for the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET community and TeeChart for PHP is an open-source library for PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
environments. The TeeChart Charting Library offers Charts, Maps
MAPS
Maps is the plural of map, a visual representation of an area.As an acronym, MAPS may refer to:* Mail Abuse Prevention System, an organisation that provides anti-spam support...
and Gauge (instrument) in versions for Delphi VCL, Activex
ActiveX
ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....
, C Sharp (programming language) for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Java (programming language)
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
and PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
. Full sourcecode has always been available for all versions except the ActiveX version. TeeChart's user interface is translated to 37 languages.
History
The first version of TeeChart was authored in 1995 by David Berneda, co-founder of Steema, using the Borland DelphiBorland Delphi
Embarcadero Delphi is an integrated development environment for console, desktop graphical, web, and mobile applications.Delphi's compilers use its own Object Pascal dialect of Pascal and generate native code for 32- and 64-bit Windows operating systems, as well as 32-bit Mac OS X and iOS...
Visual Component Library
Visual Component Library
VCL is a visual component-based object-oriented framework for developing Microsoft Windows applications. It was developed by Borland for use in, and tightly integrated with, its Delphi and C++Builder RAD tools...
programming environment and TeeChart was first released as a shareware version and made available via Compuserve
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
in the same year. It was written in the first version of Delphi VCL, as a 16-bit Charting Library named TeeChart version 1. The next version of TeeChart was released as a 32-bit library (Delphi 2 supported 32-bit compilation) but was badged as TeeChart VCL v3 to coincide with Borland's naming convention for inclusion on the toolbox palette of Borland Delphi v3 in 1997 and with C++ Builder
C++ Builder
C++Builder is a rapid application development environment, developed by Borland and owned by Embarcadero Technologies, for writing programs in the C++ programming language. C++Builder combines the Visual Component Library and IDE written in Delphi with a C++ compiler...
v3 in 1998. It has been on the Delphi/C++ Builder toolbox palette ever since, current version being Embarcadero RAD Studio XE2.
TeeChart's first ActiveX
ActiveX
ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....
version named "version 3" too, to match the VCL version's nomenclature, was released in 1998. The version was optimised to work with Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's Visual Studio v97 and v6.0 developer suites that include Visual Basic
Visual Basic
Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...
and Microsoft Visual C++ programming languages. Support for new programming environments followed with TeeChart's first native C# version for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET released in 2002 and TeeChart.Lite for .NET, a free charting component, released for Visual Studio.NET in 2003 and supporting too, Mono (programming). Steema Software released the first native TeeChart Java (programming language)
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
version in 2006 and TeeChart's first native PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
version was released in 2009 and published as open-source in June 2010. Mobile versions of TeeChart, for Android devices and Windows Phone 7 devices were released during the first half of 2011.
Usage
TeeChart is a general purpose charting component designed for use in differing ambits, offering a wide range of aesthetics to chart data. Generally TeeCharts published in the field, in areas where large amounts of data must be interpreted regularly, remain by designer choice in their simplest form to maximize the "data-ink ratio". Sloan Digital Sky SurveySloan Digital Sky Survey
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-filter imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project was named after the Alfred P...
, SDSS Web Services' use for charting "Scientific .. plotting of online data" at The Virtual Observatory Spectrum Services reflects that approach. The SDSS chart authors choose to represent data using TeeChart's standard 2D line display. Speed is also a factor when choosing how to most effectively plot data. Realtime data, at frequencies of up to tens or hundreds of data points or more per second, require the most processor economic approach to charting. Computer processing time dedicated to the plotting of data needs to be as lightweight as possible, freeing-up computer tasks "to achieve real-time data acquisition, display and analysis".
An important and stated aspect of many data visualisation applications is the ability to offer interactivity to the user; NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
's document, the Orbital Debris Engineering Model ORDEM2008(Beta version), 2009, states that "The graphs may be zoomed, panned, copied to the clipboard, and exported to various file types" and Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture II, Volume 1, Daoliang, Li; Chunjiang, Zhao (2009), also using TeeChart, states "the properties at any point in the chart can be viewed moving the mouse over it". Writing about control education, Juha Lindfors states "The desired charting functionality (such as zooming and scaling) is achieved..".
Charting applications have become increasingly 'onlined', made available either to a wider public or to a territorially remote userbase via networked applications. The World wide web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
(the Web) has become "by far, the most popular Internet protocol" to disseminate online applications. Most major IDEs now offer environments for web application developed aimed at browser hosted applications. Charting components, TeeChart among them, have adapted to provide models that work within a browser environment, often using static images and scripted layering techniques such as Ajax (programming)
Ajax (programming)
Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
to offer a level of interactivity, improve response times and hide apparent delay from the user. Options to enrich client, browser-side processing flexibility are exploited by TeeChart libraries via modules that offer 'micro-environments' within the browser, such as the long established ActiveX
ActiveX
ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....
technology, Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
, Microsoft Silverlight or Java Applets. Serverside environments offer too, a means to interact with browser based script to dynamically respond to charting requests. Joomla and CodeIgniter are host environments for TeeChart PHP and an example of an Embarcadero IntraWeb VCL
IntraWeb VCL
IntraWeb is a web application framework written in the programming language Delphi. It has been bundled with the Delphi IDE since Delphi 7....
designed application using TeeChart, is documented here.
External links and programmer reference
The Code ProjectThe Code Project
The Code Project is a website that contains articles for an audience of computer programmers. Articles can be related to general programming, GUI design, algorithms or collaboration. Most of the articles have been uploaded by visitors and have not been extracted from an external source. Nearly...
includes a demo that uses TeeChart.Lite, called 'Self-Organizing Feature Maps (Kohonen maps)' written by Bashir Magomedovl and SourceForge
SourceForge
SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
includes a Database Stress and Monitor that also uses TeeChart.Lite. For information about TeeChart support for Freepascal see TeeChart conversion status at the Free Pascal Wiki. Reference information about TeeChart for PHP use may be found at the CodeIgniter wiki pages.
Books and information sources that include substantial sections about working with the Delphi version of TeeChart include "Mastering Delphi 6" by Marco Cantù, "C++ Builder 5 developer's guide", a video Delphi Tutorial on charting JPEG compression and support forums and reference pages at TeeChart Support Forums. Non-English language document sources include, in Czech "Myslíme v jazyku Delphi 7: knihovna zkušeného programátora" by Marco Cantù, and Chinese, Delphi 6, Delphi, and Delphi 5.