SPUG: summary: plot frameworks

Fred Morris m3047 at inwa.net
Wed Jul 9 23:10:58 CDT 2003


GnuPlot         http://www.gnuplot.info/        2
        Some perl modules may be available.

Chart::Plot                                     2

GD::Graph                                       1

Perl Tk                                         (found that myself)
        Has a plot demo. The Canvas widget supports PostScript
        output. The demo code doesn't seem to be designed to be
        immediately adaptable to real-world application, more like
        its primarly purpose is to showcase Tk and prowess of the
        programmers.

BLT                                             (found that myself)
        A Tk add-on. Nice built-in support for zooming and output
        of not only PostScript but bitmaps. No direct Perl support
        though.

So, looks like I've got some reading to do...

Ultimately if the concept works out, I'll probably want to serve it up
web-based somehow and hyperlink it back to the original data, but somewhere
in there there's got to be a suitable tool for proof of concept! It all
depends on how the data munging goes. If anybody's truly curious, they can
e-mail me directly; maybe I'll publish something on the web if it works
well. I'll just say for the moment that it has to do with analyzing and
graphing relationships between entities over time (yes, I'm thinking of my
calendar and contacts data). The same concept might also be put to
analyzing intrusion logs (what a coincidence, I've got some of those, too).
The basic concepts involved aren't new or even particularly esoteric (at
least to me, I saw one of the algorithms in use in some form or another in
the early 1980s), but the combination might be fairly novel.


Anyway, hopefully I'll have something interesting to follow this up with in
a month or three.


(PS, I was able to get the Perl Tk plot demo working... without reading
FAQs. At least with the not-exactly current copy I had, the demos didn't
run out of the box, they were embedded in some sort of baroque framework.
But all it took was shebang /usr/bin/perl, creating a main window, and
calling MainLoop()... FWIW. The demo code is not exactly fast food, but the
necessary nuggets of nutrition could be extracted fairly easily and made to
work.)

--

Fred Morris
m3047 at inwa.net





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