Ryan Christensen — Your friendly neighborhood web specialist

In a relatively unexpected move Google has released an API for their internal chart-generation library.

The entire chart is drawn and described using the image tag’s URL. An array of (well styled) chart types are avilable, including: line charts, bar charts, pie charts, venn diagrams, and scatter plots. Their introduction explains the system best:

The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

You can include a Chart API image in a webpage by embedding a URL within an <img> tag. When the webpage is displayed in a browser the Chart API renders the image within the page.

Use of the Google Chart API is subject to a query limit of 50,000 queries per user per day. If you go over this 24-hour limit, the Chart API may stop working for you temporarily. If you continue to exceed this limit, your access to the Chart API may be blocked.

I’m not sure exactly how I could/would use this on any current projects, but it’s definitely something to tuck into ones bag of tricks. (Via Tobias. Google’s official announcement here.)