Language for Online Graphing

M

Michael Hill

Hello, all.

I am considering writing an online graphing utility. I plan it to be
of good quality, such that an undergraduate university student can
print it out and include it with a lab report.
Data points will be entered, having been generated by another program;
the utility will NOT accept functions for plotting--just the data
points.

As far as I know, Javascript does not provide graphing functionality.
Could somebody in this group please let me know what the best language
to use for writing this utility.

Thanks a lot.

Michael
 
R

Randy Webb

Michael said:
Hello, all.

I am considering writing an online graphing utility. I plan it to be
of good quality, such that an undergraduate university student can
print it out and include it with a lab report.
Data points will be entered, having been generated by another program;
the utility will NOT accept functions for plotting--just the data
points.

As far as I know, Javascript does not provide graphing functionality.
Could somebody in this group please let me know what the best language
to use for writing this utility.

If all you are wanting to do is to graph points, that can be easily done
with javascript. Two ways.

Method 1:

Create a grid that is x by y pixels, with each pixel being a div tag
with its background color set, with overflow: hidden; set on it. Then,
loop through the data points, find its corresponding div tag, and change
its background color.

It is the underlying method of this page:
<URL: http://www.hikksworld.com/graphIt/index.html />
Simply click on two points in the blue, it will draw a red line between
them. Yours would be a lot simpler, because that one determines each
point between the two clicked points, and moves a red image down instead
of changing the background color.

Later tonight, I will work on changing that one to use divs instead of
the image that it uses now.

Method 2:

Accept all the points. Then dynamically create the page, with div tags
(or a table) with background colors accordingly. This might actually be
the simplest method.
 
K

kaeli

mhill37 said:
As far as I know, Javascript does not provide graphing functionality.
Could somebody in this group please let me know what the best language
to use for writing this utility.

If you can't get what you need from Randy's solution, java applets can
do this.
Ask for help with that in comp.lang.java*

--
 
P

pipjockey

Hello, all.

I am considering writing an online graphing utility. I plan it to be
of good quality, such that an undergraduate university student can
print it out and include it with a lab report.
Data points will be entered, having been generated by another program;
the utility will NOT accept functions for plotting--just the data
points

I used the drag &drop library from this site and found it to be very
easy and well documented. For the application that you described, this may
be a reasonable solution.

http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm
 
B

Brian Genisio

Ike said:
Do this in php. THere are tons of publibly available scripts out there to do
anything you want in this regard. Additionally, as for printing and such, it
is all handled by your browser (pagination, etc.). -Ike

This, of course, assumes that you *can* do this in PHP. Not everyone
has access to PHP on their server, and most developers have no control
over the support on their server.

It also assumes the technical know-how to do server-side scripting, and
the familiarity with PHP to know how to include dynamicly created
images... I suppose it also assumes that the PHP installation has the
required capabilities, like the image creation extensions.

Lots of assumptions here. Also, please do not top-post.

Brian
 

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