30 Nov 2004
Jaguar Death Watch #2
’nuff said!
If you want to do charts or graphs in PHP, you’ve pretty much got three options. Build your own using PHP’s image functions, use JpGraph, or use PHPLOT. If you’re like most people, your time is precious, so that rules out the first option. Having experimented with both JpGraph and PHPLOT, I chose PHPLOT. They are both object-oriented. You include them in your pages the same way. However, in the end, PHPLOT just worked better for me.
I began first with JpGraph, and finally got a decent looking chart after an hour or two of trial and error, even though there were countless examples on which to base my code. And even then, I never could get the axis labels to come out right.
I left my chart as it was, leaving it for another day. A month or so later, I tried again to clean it up, but with little success, and decided to look for other options. That’s when I found PHPLOT. I re-adjusted my code to use it, and out came a chart that just plain worked. It looked a little plainer, but it worked exactly the way my brain visualized as I was coding it.
The trade off, it seems to me, is that JpGraph is more full-featured, but more complex with a longer learning curve. PHPLOT is quick and easy, but doesn’t seem to have all the bells and whistles, so the charts look a little plainer.