Google Analytics API on App Engine Treemap Visualization

It's Friday, time for some fun!

Here is a captivating way to visualize your Google Analytics data in a Treemap visualization and you can visualize your own data with our live demo.
(note: IE currently not supported for visualization part)





The goal of this example was to teach people how to use the Google Analytics API on App Engine in Java. As well as demonstrating how to use both OAuth and AuthSub along with the App Engine's various services. The code looked great, but the output was a boring HTML table. So I used some open source tools to transform the table into a pretty tree map visualization!

All the code has been open sourced on Google Project hosting. I also wrote an article describing how this application works making it easy for developers to use this example as a starting point for new data visualizations and other Google Data projects.

For the data retrieval part, this example uses the App Engine Java SDK and the Google Analytics Data Export API Java Client Library to retrieve data from Google Analytics. The example code implements both unsigned AuthSub and registered OAuth authorization methods allowing developers to get up and running quickly in development environments and later switch to a secure authorization method in production environments. The application also uses the Model-View-Controller pattern, making it flexible and allowing developers to extend the code for new applications. (like adding support for other Google Data APIs)

For the visualization part, I used the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library to create the Treemap. This JavaScript library is maintained by the Stanford Visualization Group and excels at creating brand new visualizations from a data set (in this case a boring HTML table). To handle all of the interactions, including rollover, tooltips and slider controls, I used JQuery. Here is the JavaScript source to the visualization part of the sample.

Enjoy!

By Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

P.S. If you have created any cool new visualizations using the Google Analytics Data Export API, email us so we can highlight them as well.