Highcharts on the server side
In the first edition of this book, we mentioned a number of technologies that can be used to produce chart images purely on the server side. Within those technologies, PhantomJS is the most prominent. In a nutshell, it is a standalone program that is capable of running JavaScript on the server. Besides this, it is easy to use, has minimum setup, and is programmable and robust.
The alternative approach was to use Rhino, a Java implementation of the JavaScript engine, to run JavaScript on the server side so that Highcharts can be run on the server side to export a chart into an SVG file. Then, the SVG file is forwarded to Batik, a generic Java-based SVG toolkit, to produce an image file from SVG.
Since then, Highcharts have extensively experimented with different approaches and concluded that incorporating PhantomJS is the solution moving forward. There are a number of reasons for this decision. First, Rhino has rendering problems compared to PhantomJS, which makes...
