graphs in xstatistics

Hi,

In general i like this. But...
* Please mind your code style. This looks very drafty with lots of pieces commented.
* Use english comments, use doxygen comments and dont use separators // ----
* Please dont use functions like _image_.,.. they will conflict with image module.

* We dont ship 3rd party code in a module, so we need docs on how to imstall jgraph
* We dont want to force people to use this 3rd party thing. it should be optional. xstatistics.module should detect when the lib is there and then use it,

And we realy want to generate these graphs in a cron run :)
Which is why i really prefer svg. Moz will support this (again) in some next version, konqueror and safari already support it. And indeed, IE needs a plugin, but frankly: i dont care :)

Hi Ber and Willi and anyone else,

Has anyone done any more work on getting jpgraph going with xstatistics? If you've played with the views module, I'm imagining a jpgraph module that will let admins build graphs from data, arguements, and filters made available much like it is done with the views module. In a sentence - views module is like a GUI for building queries for node/other views based on arguements and filters. I'd like to make a module that works like the views module administratively, but instead of a GUI for building node/other views, it would be a GUI for building graphs made by jpgraph.

You could select what type of graph, stylistic elements, axis variables, etc., and include arguements for time constraints, taxonomy vocabs/terms, users, etc.

Thoughts?

Ian

1) the current implementation of jpgraph is bad. Its a Proof of concept, nothing more
2) JPgraph is VERY heavy. very. Meaning that having this included requires people to change the memory limit, only to run this module!
3) I have other plans for xstatistics and views. Watch the logs
4) I personally beleive in SVG for this much more. Its lighter and FF 1.5 supports it too now. Its not hard to simply hide the graphs for IE without the svg plugins. All other modern clients have SVG support.

Bèr

Interesting, a good experiment. I have my eye on this subject. I kind of like the idea of SVG for the same reasons as Ber, and it will be interesting to see how fast support for SVG is implemented.

How time passes...

I thought I'd leave a link to an example to interest people who might have some time. Use FF to view:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/images/shapes/rect01.svg
Look at the page source.

I'm just daydreaming here. The first step would be a php->svg engine? Or should this be done in jQuery? Hmm. This definitely needs to be a category in the next SOC.

I wonder how standard that XML is, and whether most of the tools are already in Drupal to generate it.

I wonder if that XML would be just as suitable as input to a javascript parser, that would then create the SVG.

SVG is a standard, Flash is not, hence I won't put any flash in there.

I did some proof of concept work a year ago: create SVG with PHP. Its dead easy. But chose against further development at that time, because safari and Konqueror were the only browsers with OOTB SVG support. Now tha t FF joined the crew, I think the userbase is large enough.

Some of my bookmarks, for reference:
* detect SVG capabilities: http://blog.codedread.com/archives/2005/06/21/detecting-svg-viewer-capab...
* AJAX/JS and PHP SVG charting: http://cristian.nexcess.net/ajax/svg_chart/
* The lib I used (code from) in my proof of concept: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2184.html

I searched my archives but could not find my PHP code for that POC again. pity :(.

I've created this group to open up discussions.

http://groups.drupal.org/graphing-svg

Taking the liberty of closing this ticket, since the groups forum is probably better for chewing the fat over this.