[lug] Creating a cute graphic on webpage

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 19:01 -0400, Gordon Golding wrote:
> I am working with a remote sensing cluster.  Rather than just show
> numbers, I want to come up with an informational graphic.

Lots of options, some already mentioned.  CSS is a nice clean one but
you'll still have to write the code that outputs the CSS and a web page
that uses it.  Still, not a bad solution.  

Others:

1. FusionCharts: Flash based graphs.  http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/
There are Drupal modules to support this:
flashnode
fusioncharts
I've used this for a social engineering web site prototype project.  At
least the charts looked nice.

2. Java: JFreeChart: http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
I never liked embedding Java in a web page.  But I found the API easy to
use in a standalone Java application I wrote.

3. PHP: PChart: http://pchart.sourceforge.net/
I think we looked at this when doing that social engineering project.
Not sure why we didn't pick it.  Maybe because at the time it may not
have had a Drupal module available.  But I could be wrong.

4. C, Perl: ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
If you just want to code it to generate images, this may be the way to
go.

5. PHP: PHP-GD (using GD Library): Just google for "PHP GD"

6. HTML5 - no idea if this would work, but something tells me you can do
some interesting things here: http://diveintohtml5.org/canvas.html

You can also script this in GIMP but you gotta know Python or Script-Fu
(Scheme), neither of which I know.

Personally, I think I like the CSS option.  If you're clever, you can
generate some interesting stuff with CSS.  See the Zen Garden for
examples: http://www.csszengarden.com/

-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>