Your experience with Google Visualization for Commercial/Production

[cam luc]

Have you used Google Visualization API in any Commercial or Production
environment?
If yes, for how long? How was your experience with it?

Above was my main question. As a side-note, one of my concerns is it
seems the API is still under development. I am afraid if we
incorporate it into our product, and Google makes changes / releases a
newer version, it may break the functionality. It does not look like
there is a way to specify which version of the API to use.

If you have knowledge / experience with this, please comment. Thank
you.

[cam luc]

To add something I found: Is it safe to embed a chart in my website?
Not really.
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/faq.html#isitsafe

[asgallant]

I've been using the charts in a production environment for ~7 months now.  By and large, it has been a positive experience, with the one notable drawback that there is no provision to choose the version used on the client-side.  As the charts guy on my dev team, I have to check all of our charts for errors every time Google pushes a new version to production, and if something breaks, then I'm stuck either retrofitting the charts to the new way of doing things or finding a way to hack around the problem.  That being said, there has been only one major bug that affected my charts (and there have been a handful that didn't affect my charts at all) since I started using them.

New versions are released on a monthly cadence, with beta versions available for testing one or two weeks in advance.  If you test your charts against the beta versions, you can usually catch most bugs/API changes before they make it to production.

[asgallant]

It's no "less safe" than any 3rd party JS tools (and probably considerably more safe than most).  There is always the risk that someone sufficiently determined could hack the API server and insert malicious code.  But then again, someone could hack your website and do the same thing.

[Xavier Gumara]

We have been using the GWT integretion of the API for three months
now.

As stated above, one of the majors concerns is that it is still in
development and bugs/issues take too long to be resolved for its use
in production systems. One of the major inconvinient is not being able
to use the charts offline and the fact that the charts not always look
good (specially the axis texts) in all browsers.

We have been considering switching to other API for the charts in our
products because all of that.

[NA]

We're considering using it in production. Concerns are:

- production API can be upgraded/modified out of our control
- inability to specify which version of the API to use
- some concerns about the API's design
- some concern about bugs and how quickly/slowly they are fixed
- performance with large data sets (thousands of rows, maybe 10-20
columns)

A minor issue is the inability to host the js files if desired. This
isn't a deal killer, but it is always on our list of concerns.