[Santa-rosa-pm] charting tools

Geoffrey Broadwell geoff at broadwell.org
Sat Dec 29 14:12:56 PST 2007


On Sat, 2007-12-29 at 13:55 -0800, Bob Blick wrote:
> I'd like to produce some charts on demand for a webpage, and I'm
> wondering which perl module to use.

This may not be the best way to do it, depending on your requirements --
see below.

> I just want simple charts with data
> in the y axis and time on the x axis, like you'd expect to see
> temperature data, something like a chart recorder would produce. Legends
> and grids would be nice too.

Lots of modules will do this.  At a low level, GD and it's associated
GD::Graph modules may do the trick.  See:

    http://search.cpan.org/~mverb/GDGraph-1.43/
    http://www.jonblog.uklinux.net/www/presentation/GDGraphing.html

>  Either PNG or GIF output.

Also consider the HTML canvas element.  The server just writes the raw
data out to the web page, and some simple JavaScript does the actual
graphing.  That's how I did our systems performance dashboard at work,
so that the stats server doesn't ever have to do the graphing, and to
make page loads faster.

The canvas element is supported natively on Safari 2.0, Firefox 1.5, and
Opera 9.0, all of which have been out for a good while.  It is also
supported on IE (5? 6?) using Google's "excanvas.js" thunk layer.

Still, if you have to support ancient browsers, you might need to stick
with Ye Olde GD.


-'f




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