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?"

Comments

Javascript

[Basje]

I once wrote a piece of javascript that would do this client side. It was for a corporate intranet, so I knew which version of which browser was going to be used.

The idea was simple: I created a table with every cell one pixel large, and set the colors accordingly to the input for the frame. It started out as a simple line graph, but in the end it could do bar and pies too.

This should be doable crossbrowser now that JS has stabilized enough between IE and Moz. If implemented right, it can really do with much lower bandwidth than pictures (which was the main requirement then): the .js file can be cached, so only the data has to be sent, measuring a large multicolor pie graph in bytes rather Kbytes.

Re:How about HTML and CSS?

[gazbo]

Cute idea - time to dig up the rasterizing algorithm and port it to JS. Yeah, in principle it would work (might possibly be a problem trying to persuade the browser that no, really, I honestly do want these TDs and TRs all to be on adjacent pixels.

I wonder how quickly a browser could re-flow a document that included an 800X600 cell table...My guess is "painfully", but it's almost worth writing the concept code to find out - time to write some PHP (I'm buggered if I'm going to write it by hand)