[jfreechart-dev] New to the List

[John S. L. <stl...@ne...>]

Hi,

I'm new to this list and to JFreeChart. I'm not sure what the  
protocol is for a first message, but here goes.

I'm an engineer, not a programmer, although most of my work has been  
as a Java programmer for the last few years. I just started working  
with JFreeChart two weeks ago, and I like it. I also found it kind of  
tough to get started, even with the developer guide. I've never  
worked on an open source project, so I don't understand the ins and  
outs of suggesting changes, submitting code, etc. Is there a place  
that newbies can go to get educated?

As for areas I'm interested in:

1) Better documentation: The developer guide has everything in it,  
but things can be hard to find. For instance, I couldn't understand  
how to display coordinates for a mouse click, until I stumbled across  
cross hair. I would be willing to work on a section of the developer  
guide that would answer questions like: How do I change the color of  
a line, the background, or an axis? How do I draw a line? How do I  
change a line to a dashed line? How do I place a label? etc. The  
section would have short code examples showing the method calls for  
different chart types.

2) A probability axis: If you're not familiar with a probability  
axis, a Normal distribution will plot as a straight line on a linear  
probability plot, and a Log-Normal distribution will plot as a  
straight line on a log probability plot. It's useful in certain kinds  
of analysis, and it's very hard to find a charting package with a  
probability axis. I would like to develop such an axis, but I will  
have to learn a lot more about rendering.

3) Event handling: Some method calls that update a chart seem to  
propagate to the chart just fine. For other method calls you have to  
use a SwingUtilities.invokeLater call to get the change to display on  
the chart, but it's not clear when you have to do that until you test  
the code. On other projects I have extended AWTEventMulticaster, and  
used it to manage and notify listeners. My events extended AWTEvent,  
although I don't think that is necessary. I will play around with  
creating a JFreeEventMulticaster, to see if it might be useful for  
event handling. I think it may simplify the code for notifying all of  
the listeners of an event, but I don't know if it will work "better"  
or not.

Any comments will be appreciated.

Thank you,

John