Monday, November 30, 2009

Swivel4J - A New Java Client for Swivel

At work, we were looking for a simple way to visualize business data without having to build and host it ourselves. This led us to Swivel (the new Swivel as they call it which is geared towards private data shared within an organization). With Swivel, we can upload our data, create pretty charts and graphs, and share them privately within our company.

Swivel has a REST API for managing the charts. Though not difficult, we found it a little unwieldy to have to use an HTTP client to setup each API call. This naturally led to a small library that wrapped the REST API calls in a native Java API.

We decided to make this library available to everyone as Swivel4J which is open source and hosted on Google Code. We hope this makes it easier for Java, Groovy, and Scala developers to get started with Swivel and promotes the use of Swivel in general.

Please try it out and give feedback, submit patches, etc.