Maybe the difficulty you found with their chart tools reflects some inherent complexity of the problem? Did you ever find an easier / more useful library?
In the absence of a better solution, I would wager that it's just a hard problem that they're trying to solve.
Did you ever find an easier / more useful library?
In the full knowledge that this comparison is apples versus porcupines: OpenFlashChart 2 is my favorite charting software ever. It gives you quite a bit of fine-grained control, but if your needs are I Want A Freaking Bar Chart then in ten minutes you will have A Freaking Bar Chart. There are no steps such as "OK, first things first: we're going to need you to scale your data down to fit in the range 0 to 100. Then you pass that to us with your min and maxes -- you have to specify those, we don't pick sanely -- and we'll recreate your original data for you."
I'm sure there is a good technical reason for that but, ahem, I use APIs so that I don't have to care about good technical reasons for things being hard. That is the sort of ugly implementation detail that the API is supposed to bury for me. (Google Charts is still impressive, by the way, in that it totally abstracts away server administration and scaling issues from graphical processing, which if you were to scratch build yourself would not be pleasant. Also, since you end up with standard image tags, you can use it with any browser, down to and including the ancient Japanese cellphone I often check my stats from. That said: it could be better. I see they have a Javascript version now and it looks much, much saner.)
In particular google-collections (http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/) and guice (http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/) are, in my qualitative estimation, fabulously designed.
Maybe the difficulty you found with their chart tools reflects some inherent complexity of the problem? Did you ever find an easier / more useful library?
In the absence of a better solution, I would wager that it's just a hard problem that they're trying to solve.