Ask HN: Which PHP chart solution do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which PHP chart solution do you use?

4 pointsNathanKP9 comments

I am searching for an efficient, free chart building solution for my current PHP based startup project. I have explored a number of different options, from image based charts to flash.

However, before I actually start coding I thought I would throw out the question to find out which PHP charting libraries other programmers are using.

Please tell me which PHP libraries you have used or would recommend.

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There are quite a few.

BUT:

When I looked into this a few months ago, I found that PHP generation of graphs is expensive. It was cheaper to send just the data to the browser and let a Flash control or jQuery do the graphing. This removes a big bottleneck.

I settled on a for-pay mapping Flash control and an open source Flash graphs control. Both accept data in sensible XML and so it wasn't hard to talk to them.

Okay, that was one of my worries, that PHP generation of the graphs would overload my server. However, I haven't yet found a good looking flash based graph generator. Open Flash Chart looks like it might be an option, but I don't really like the way their charts look.

I would love to find something that looks and acts like the charts that Google Analytics uses.

Open Flash Chart is what I use and you can style it extensively. The default is horrible though, I agree.

Getting the GA look, or something very close to it, shouldn't be too hard IMHO. Getting the functionality might be tricky if the control doesn't support it.

The main thing that I want is for their to be a tooltip over data points so that the user doesn't have to "sight" over to the axis to try to read the graph. If Open Flash Chart supports that it would be attractive.

Yes you can add labels. I know as I've done it :)

I too would recommend you use client side. For client side, you can use

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/ < what google analytics uses

http://www.simile-widgets.org/

http://www.danvk.org/dygraphs/

http://highcharts.com/ < looks awesome

http://www.maani.us/

http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/

Thank you for the list. I will look through the options.

Has anyone tried the jQuery chart plugin?

ive used pCharts for strictly php. http://pchart.sourceforge.net/ It doesnt do real time updating since it spits out an image. Im sure theres a slick way to do it but for what i was using it was quite minimal

Open Flash Charts is slick. i dig it. http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/ I switched from pCharts to OFC for a project i was using. I like it much better.

I tried google charts but i find it lacking. It is real hard to control and just not quite polished for what i was looking for. That and (i think) it requires an internet connection to dial out to google. Its potentially a problem if you're actually building thats not a webapp.

Also someone announced a js based charting engine here on ycombinator about a few weeks back. I thought it was real slick... i wish i had it book marked.

Thanks for the response. I have now settled on the jQuery based charting plugin. It seems fairly lightweight and has the advantage of being client side. It also looks good. I have customized the CSS so that it looks fairly similar to Google Analytics.

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