CIS 8020 Assignment 2 DF Customer Spending

An accountant who works as a private contractor aims to visualize for his clients their spending habits. The accountant has received access to his client's purchases and these purchases come in as a CSV feed at the end of each day from the client's credit card company. The accountant wants to differentiate himself from others, by giving the clients an on demand access to their spending habits. The on-demand access to this information will be provided by a website that the accountant has built for his client.

Google's Chart API is a perfect solution as an on demand provider of this data visualization. With some simple javascript work that accesses the credit card's CSV file and Google's Chart API, the accountant can provide to his client an on demand visualization of up to date spending habits. Below is an example of what that a client might see as his spending habbits. The graph is generated with Google's Chart API.





http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Spending+by+Category&chts=000000,10&chs=500x195&chf=bg,s,ffffff&cht=p3&chd=t:35.78,23.15,15.78,11.57,9.47,2.10,1.05,1.05&chl=Education|Business+Expenses|House|Shopping|Food+&+Dining|Auto+&+Transport|Bills+&+Utilities|Health+&+Fitness&chco=ff6633,00ff66,0066ff,99cccc,00ffff,ffcc33,9900ff,993366

The reason the accountant chose this API for implementation is because its easy to access and code. With some crafty coding the accountant can pull out the spending categories, dollars spent, and their percentages from the CSV file and plug them into the API URL. Since the CSV file will be updated on a daily basis, this allows the accountant to offer to his clients an up to date representation of spending habits without doing any additional work himself (other than setting up the service initially). This API works best because its fast, easy to use, and dependable. Read More!

CIS 8020 Assignment 2 MB Google Charts

An international shipping company does a lot of business with the USA. Since it's based in the UK, it has funds in both Euro and British Pounds, and can use either to pay for shipment. Due to currency rate fluctuations, it may be more advantageous to pay in one currency over another at a particular point in time. In order to make the decision which currency to use, the company would like to visualize the data to help with the decision.

The company decided to use Google's Chart API for several reasons. Since it's web-based, charts can easily be embedded into dashboards and other reports. The charts are also dynamic, since it's possible to supply a currency rate data URL instead of static, hardcoded figures. Ideally, once set up, the business doesn't have anything else to configure, except refresh the page/dashboard to get an updated graph.



The Chart API was an ideal choice since the setup is straightforward, with minimal programming knowledge -- just plug parameters into the URL. Both the chart and the forex data are hosted and retrieved elsewhere for free, requiring the company minimal overhead to operate the functionality. This is essentially a turn-key solution with faster and cheaper deployment compared to proprietary and self-hosted charting packages. Read More!

Mashups Presentation Abstract & Articles

Below is an abstract of the topics that we will cover in the presentation. Also included are some good reading and viewing material.

Topics:

• Background of Mashups - webbased or server based apps that are unique but share charachterestics of the "mashed up" sources
  
• Consumer Mashups - Data
  
• Enterprise Mashups - Data and Processes
  
• Technology behind Mashups - API, SOA, XML, Javascript, Java, .Net
  
• Examples
  
• Demo - Yahoo! Pipes
  

Good articles to read for about mashups.

• http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=872
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6e7Jaz4FOc
• http://www.programmableweb.com/apis
• http://www.slideshare.net/jokay/mashups-presentation
• http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Mashups:_The_What_and_Why
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Mashups
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Api

Read More!