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Comment by nappy-doo | Hacker News Reader

I work for the team that maintains Chartserver. It's being deprecated for a number of reasons, none of which you've listed. Mostly, we feel the service has been replaced by JS charting solutions (Google Charts, d3, etc.) which are more flexible and don't have the privacy concerns of Chartserver. Most importantly, the team that developed it has moved on to other work and it hasn't been restaffed.

We revisit the deprecation of Chartserver every couple of months (I believe it's had two stays of execution), so there might be some life left in that old code.

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I've done a ton of work with Chartserver, and I'm continually impressed by how elegant it is in every detail of its implementation. Although, I'm also a huge fan of D3. Not every chart should be built in JavaScript. I can embed it, I can drop it in an email, I can serve up 20 charts on a page in milliseconds, and I can do it equally quickly anywhere in the world.

Services like this, are one of the things that keeps up 'Google's not just in it for the money' cred, I'm going to be really sorry to see it go.

It's not dead yet.

> Most importantly, the team that developed it has moved on to other work and it hasn't been restaffed.

Isn't that right there an example, or warning, or admonition, or something, suggesting that you not use external services for essential features? I know that no page is likely to last more than five years, but there are going to be many pages that outlast services like this.

Or am I missing the target use case?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "no page is likely to last more than five years," because a large portion of the Web is composed of pages that, once posted, remain indefinitely. If your site is one of them, you wouldn't want to depend on an external source for your charts, or your archived pages could be broken by a third party--which seems to be your (very good) point, so I'm a bit confused by your wording.

I'm assuming that a page has a life, I picked five years. The implication being if your page isn't going to last long, it's not that big a deal if you rely on an external resource. But if you're one of the few (or the many) that are going to last longer than the expected life of one of these ephemeral services, you shouldn't rely on it. That's as opposed to paying for the services of, say, an established, paid and hopefully long lived CDN or similar.

Also the look is brilliant, especially with the current trends in flat design. I so infrequently see it used to it's full potential.

Check out: http://smashrun.com/chris.lukic/overview It uses both D3 and ChartServer, but there's no way I'll ever get the page load to something comparable using only d3.

When is it depreciated exactly. Says 2015, but is that going to be January, or December? (I need to replace them in my app at work).

https://developers.google.com/chart/terms

Again, Chartserver has had a number of stays of execution. Officially, we're killing it in 2015, but it would surprise me. Usage numbers just haven't been what you would expect from a deprecated product.

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