I will show you how WebChart works, take a look at the following picture furst, it's WebChart's techniqual framework.
WebChart is a three-tier applications, you can view data in HTML or XML or PDF format with your browser, or download the data in a Excel file. But the PDF module is hard to use, and it can consume lots of memory cache, so I disable it as default. No client utility install required.
All the WebChart components are located in the mid-tier, a J2EE servlet container. I wrote some servlet programs to package Oracle Chart Builder and AnySQL DB Query togather for all the WebChart features. It accept three types of files. The config file specify the database connections. The XSL file controls how the data is displayed in the browser. The WCML(WebChart Mark Language) file define the page's attributes, including the SQL query for data, and the XSL file for data display.
The third tier is database layer. You can connect to any types of database, and you can connect to multiple databases as data sources.
To make WebChart work for you, you should choose an application server, and install the Java SDK (1.4 or higher), and install a J2SE servlet container, such as Tomcat. For example, I installed it my Windows XP server to the following locations.
JAVA_HOME=c:\jdk
TOMCAT_HOME=d:\TomcatWebChart
Then download WebChart and extract it to Tomcat home directory's webapps subdirectory (d:\TomcatWebChart\webapps), and modify the config file for correct database connections informations. WebChart will be working once you start up tomcat.