needs suggestions for website graphs

or use a graphing api?

[edzillion]

My company wants to display graphs on its website.
- the graphs will be static but the data dynamic (ie. need to click refresh to update the graph)
- they want the graphs to be wholly owned by us, no branding from another company

I've looked about, and there isnt much - smartdraw, visual mining are the only ones I can find, and there is always visio but I dont know if that can be run via server scripts and embedded in a page.

Has anyone any experience of this?

Cheers
Ed

[phranque]

you can easily create your own graphs with a graphing package.
you can have the image tag source refer to a cgi script that responds with the image headers and content.
for example i usually use perl with GD::Graph [search.cpan.org].

[edzillion]

I suppose a server side script that automatically writes images to a certain url could be used to display on other's websites relatively easily.
Are there any off-the-shelf apps that can do this?

[limbo]

You can use CSS - search for CSS Graphs and you may be surprised what can be achieved with some raw data and a bit on ingenuity.

[dreamcatcher]

Try looking on Sourceforge too, you`ll find all sorts of things on there.

dc

[edzillion]

I was thinking about something more robust than css.

Basically the idea is to have the server constantly polling another site for some data in XML format, and continuously build graph images from this information and dump them to specific urls.

I looked on Sourceforge and couldn't find anything that stood out for its completeness or features. Any suggestions?

[g1smd]

What's the technology behind the graphs within Google Analytics?

[LifeinAsia]

You might want to look into the Google Chart API [code.google.com].

[henry0]

phpclass should have a bunch of such