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Drawing Graphs on Your Browser?
Pieroxy queries: "I recently had a look at various ways to draw a graph (lines, bar chart, pie chart...) for a web-based enterprise application. As we need some interactivity, the GIF image generated on the server-side is not an option. Here is the list of technologies I can think of: Flash is probably over kill and a closed technology. Java is very flexible but slow (to start and run). SVG (discussed here) still requires a plugin. VML is supported only on IE5+, but it is natively supported. Which one of these technologies is the more flexible and interactive? Is it reasonable to require a plugin from the end users of our enterprise application? Is IE5+ a wide enough target for an enterprise application?"
2) No. If it doesn't work on (at least) Netscape/Mozilla then you're excluding too many people (unless you know something about your target audience that I don't).
Surely you can do something with DHTML/Javascript to dynamically resize bar charts...
I've recently had to do something very similar, well okay almost identical. Interactive graphs of various types and of various data sets from a Web Based interface.
:)
We have larges amounts of data which is very hard to interperate by a human in something like a spreadsheet. The only really feasable way to do it was graphs. Of course with the amount of data we had transmitting it to the client to do client side rendering (ie Java) is also out of the question.
In the end we settled on JPGraph with an interactive interface built using PHP. So a wizard style interface to choose the type of graph, what data to graph, how to group the data, and finally the outputted graph with the option to change all the settings.
With good indexed data making PHP generated graphs with JPGraph interactive is quite painless and very powerful.
Just one suggestion, make sure you have a way for people to save the settings of the graphs they make so they can pull em later, keeps the PHBs happy
I'm me. I think.
The MING library can generate SWF from PHP et. al.
If you want the interactivity, you should at least try an optimized pared down applet. It's true that most applets are slow, but it is frequently also true that they are written badly and/or contain heaps of additional libraries that they need to download. Use as much of java's built-in code as you can with the possible exception of the GUI library.
Look at lightweight graphical libraries like lwvcl (commercial) or thinlet (LGPL) for the controls. The zaval people even have a charting library for their lwvcl system. (I have never used the lwvcl library, it just looks cool - try their online demo. Thinlet packs amazing capabilities into a very small package.)
If you need to display 15 graphs at a time with limited interaction, then this may not be the way to go, but if you need to display one at a time with very rich interaction, this might be the ticket.
dhk
Corda might do what you need. It will output the images in Flash, JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG and others. I believe it uses XML files to generate the graphs. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of the other things that it can do, but it's worth taking a look. Oh, and unfortunately it's not free, but it might be worth it if it does what you need.
Note: I do not work for this company. I have seen the results of using their product. We use it where I work and everyone seems to like what it can do.