Sparklines are simple yet powerful graphics that convey a lot of information in a condensed form. They are designed to be visually appealing and easy to understand, allowing users to quickly grasp important trends and patterns in data.
However, if you want a fun project, you can create an application in Java and JSTL that generates sparklines. It's also worth checking out the minimalist python sparklines by Why, which encodes the image data in the HTML using either data: format or javascript: format (supported by IE) in JSTL.
To use the JSTL examples, you need to include taglib of 'c' and prefix of 'spark.' You can then set the 'test' variable to a string of comma-separated int values using c:set. To generate a bar sparkline, use the spark:bar tag with the 'name' attribute specifying the key to retrieve the data.
The other parameters include width, height, spacing, color, highColor, lastColor, and output. You can replace "bar" with "line" to get a line graph. Note that the highColor and lastColor attributes are not currently supported for line graphs. The color attributes can be a color name from java.awt.Color or an HTML hex color.
The latest release of this software has fixed several issues such as proper URL encoding of parameters, fixing an issue when using hex specified image colors, and adding a tag parameter called "background" as a workaround for IE6 PNG transparency.
Version 1.2: N/A