Greenplum and SitePen today announced a joint contribution to the Dojo open source project. The contribution enables any web developer to bring real time charting to web applications using AJAX.

Previously, browser-rendered charts were incapable of depicting up-to-date information. With the new capability, organizations can chart online statistics to track events as they happen. For example, an online auction site could offer their users dynamic charts that track bids for one or more auctions in real-time; and polling and survey websites could show voting results as votes are tallied—all without requiring users to download or install code, or “refresh” their web page when they want an updated chart.

The first application of the technology is Greenplum Monitor, a browser-based database monitoring application to be released later this year. Greenplum Monitor will provide a continuously updated visual representation of the status and activity of Greenplum databases and their underlying system resources. Using real-time charts, Greenplum Monitor allows database and systems administrators to track critically important statistics such as cluster and machine status; table size and skew; and CPU, disk, memory, and network utilization.

“Greenplum’s application of the real-time charting, Greenplum Monitor, is a great example of what can be achieved when combining the power of native browser vector graphics, the Dojo Toolkit, and AJAX,” says Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen, Inc., and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit. “The company’s generous donation of the source code rapidly accelerates the development process in creating real-time charting and visualization for the web.”

“Greenplum’s customers receive real value from the visual display of up-to-date data, but nobody wants to download a fat client application to get that capability. When designing a monitoring application for our database products, we wanted to give our customers the best of both worlds,” said Luke Lonergan, CTO of Greenplum. “The Dojo framework provided the perfect toolkit and community for developing the code required to make this happen. We’re excited to work with the AJAX experts at SitePen to develop and contribute the underlying technology to the open source community so that other web developers can leverage it to build more interesting and useful web applications.”