PHP vs. Javascript Graphing

[firefly2442]

Hi all,

I'm going to be creating a heavily graph-based website and am weighing the pros and cons of various third-party graph generators. For PHP libraries, they seem really easy to tie into information from databases with the downside of having to do the generation server-side. For Javascript (mostly JQuery based) libraries, the benefit is the generation is done client side but getting the data back through from PHP to Javascript seems to be quite a headache. Here is my list so far, any thoughts or recommendations?

[jpgraph.net...]
[pchart.sourceforge.net...]
[graphpite.sourceforge.net...]
[mbostock.github.com...]
[jqplot.com...]
[code.google.com...]
[omnipotent.net...]


Thanks in advance.

[incrediBILL]

It's really simple, do you intend to let the search engines index that content and potentially index those graphs?

If it's javascript it'll only show up in screen shots, if it's PHP done server side it can be indexed.

Another issue is speed, the content can be delivered faster and it's lower server resources if it's javascript based as the work if then done in the browser, not the server.

If it wasn't for needing to show graphs on iPhone/iPad, I'd continue to be using the original free version of FusionCharts, which are Flash, but really good and really cool.

[enigma1]

I have used some of the packages you posted. They will do graphs but best to pick up one you understand, because you will be making changes to the framework. That's the hard part in my experience. The js to PHP exchange wasn't a problem for my applications after getting through the graph framework.

Not sure about the graph-based site you mentioned, I assume statistics based, if you need advanced rendering/3D you may want to go with webgl right upfront.