[ABE.pm] Generating report graphs

John Cappiello john-abe at apt202.net
Fri Nov 10 08:02:02 PST 2006


So, how's your JavaScript?  :)

Seriously, for what you're suggesting, I would look at using Dojo perhaps, or
any other JS lib with support for what you want.  I suggest Dojo ony because
I've been using it a lot for the last few months, and know it can do
everything you wanted to, on the client side.

I don't quite understand the lack of requesting back to the server
requirement, but, that aside...

Have you data sets generated by perl, there are modules for JSON, and sent to
the server as JSON, or simply, JavaScript objects.

Dojo has many sublibs.  1 of which is SVG.  The have actually generalized the
graphics lib, and on IE it will fall back to VRML.  (blast form the past or
what?)  But let's assume only Firefox for now.

Dojo just also had a complete charting library donated to them, which would
also probably be of great help to you.  The dojo event system is quite
complete and would allow all sorts of interaction with either the svg or
chart parts.  

You could therefor generate one big chunk of JSON containing all the parts
and sub parts of your graph data, send it to the browser, and let JS render
your graphs for you, etc. 

As long as you don't need this process to be automated, for printing on some
sort of cron'd report type system, this would work quite. Well.

FURTHER... Firefox implements an internal Storage engine, which could be used
to store this json for offline viewing.  Again, Dojo hooks in to this, and
for cross site support, falls back to its old method of using Flash cookies
(much larger than http cookies) where available, as a storage mechanism.

Let me know if any of this is of interest to you in how to accomplish what
you wanted, and I can give more details.

Faber, sorry I sent you this directly first.  Argh.

-- 
jcap


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