Plotting area graphs

Area graphs are useful tools to display how quantitative values develop over a given interval. For data scientists, they are an effective means of understanding trends. They are based on line graphs, but the area beneath the line drawn based on the values in the axes is filled with a certain color or texture. In this recipe, you will be using the GRAL Java library to plot area graphs.

Getting ready

1. To use GRAL to plot bar charts, we need the example applications provided with the library in the form of Jar files. These example applications can be downloaded from http://trac.erichseifert.de/gral/wiki/Download. Download the gral-examples-0.10.zip file from the download location into your local disk. Extract the files.

2. Then you will see a directory structure as in the Getting ready section of the Plotting a 2D sine graph recipe. Our folder of interest is the lib folder.

3. Inside lib, you will find three Jar files: gral-core-0.10, gral-examples-0.10, and VectorGraphics2D-0.9.1...