Alternative to Many Eyes Bubble Chart - php

I am looking for a suitable package (free or otherwise) to duplicate the functionality (mainly in visual department) of IBM's Many Eyes Visualizations Bubble Chart in our app. Below attached a screenshot of what I am talking about. Ideally it does the following:
Renders with ether flash or javascript.
Ability to generate graphs at least once a day.
Ability to be interactive, i.e. clicking a bubble would be able to do a callback to our javascript
Looks very similar to the Bubble Chart from Many Eyes (attached below).
Any ideas if such a solution exists?

We use AnyChart a lot at work for data visualisation :
http://www.anychart.com/
and here you can see some examples of their bubble charts
http://www.anychart.com/products/anychart/gallery/Marker-and-Bubble-Charts.php
alt text http://jamie-dixon.co.uk/images/bubble.gif
What they say on their site:
"AnyChart is a flexible Flash based solution that allows you to create interactive and great looking flash charts. It is a cross-browser and cross-platform charting solution intended for everybody who deals with creation of dashboard, reporting, analytics, statistical, financial or any other data visualization solutions."
From our research, these guys seem to offer some of the most customisable charts we've found that let users display the data in the many formats we need and expose a variety of events, accessible via Javascript, such as click and hover on individual items.

Flare is a good data visualization library for flash.
They have demos here - click on layouts->bubbles to see what you are after.

The closest I could find is A Better Tag Cloud by Anson Parker. Its written in javascript and uses canvas for drawing the circles. Its not 100% ideal but was a great starting point:
(source: phasetwo.org)
Demo

The example you've shown appears to be a variation of treemap visualization called circular treemaps. I'm not aware of a JavaScript library for creating those, but there is a JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit that has a standard treemap gadget built-in. That may be a better choice anyway, depending on your needs — circular treemaps have the disadvantage of wasting a lot of space.
Also, I found a Java implementation of circular treemaps here, for what that's worth. An enterprising programmer could probably port that to JS or Flash.

The javascript visualisation toolkit Protovis features a wonderful Bubble chart among its examples. This could be a very nice solution, though I am not sure whether or not it supports IE, as it is based on SVG.

You may use some physics library to create that in Flash... eg. disccollision, QuickBox2D(example)

Related

Which language should I use if I want to embed a simple app on a web page?

I'm thinking about setting up a website (based on WordPress) to host video tutorials on interpreting CT scans.
In addition to simply letting the visitor view PowerPoint presentation videos, I'm keen on writing some sort of simple app that I can embed in the blog to allow the visitor to scroll through a series of images (i.e. a scan).
I usually code in REALbasic or Objective-C. I have some experience with PHP. What are my language options for making an interactive embeddable image viewer in a blog? The website needs to be able to be viewed on an iPad as well as normal desktop browsers.
Javascript.
Pick up jQuery, or a similar Javascript framework. It will help you get down to business faster.
What you are asking has nothing to do with server-side coding. It is all client-side. Because of that, your choices are something to do with a plugin (such as Flash), or Javascript. If you want it to work on an iPad, Flash and other plugins are out.
Since you need your image viewer to work on the iPad, ActionScript3, hence, Flash is out of the picture. I would use JavaScript as per the examples on the Apple HTML5 advocacy site, using the canvas element to render the viewer.
I would lean towards a javascript solution. There are loads of libraries out there that will give you a kickstart. If you know some example works of what you are thinking about doing, we can give you pros and cons for serverside vs. client side languages. Additionally, you can use html5 for a lot, but then again it depends on what exactly you are wanting to do.

How to generate a line graph based on results within a MySQL database

I need to generate a line graph based on results within a MySQL database, any ideas?
I must also point out that I do not have administrator rights to install things such as JGraph.
Google has a pretty comprehensive charting API available via javascript calls or simply image links. http://code.google.com/apis/charttools/index.html
You can use the GD library, right?
Should be able to use that to do a line graph as an image. You'd have to determine a scale and all that and figure out how to map that to the X and Y coordinates of the image, and then use that to plot the numeric data to the graph and use imageline() to draw the lines for it.
It would be the most compatible method. Java can be turned off and Flash isn't universally supported.
I don't want to give you a specific library to use, but if you searched google for "flash graph", you'll find a ton of flash graphic software. See http://www.google.ca/search?q=flash+graph&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Note, these don't require anything to be installed on your server (unlike how jpGraph requires GD).
Check out PHP/SWF Charts.
To support mobile devices, you can use a JavaScript charting library such as Flot (http://code.google.com/p/flot/).
Example : http://people.iola.dk/olau/flot/examples/basic.html
This would work for desktop (IE / Firefoex /Chrome / Safari) as well as mobile (iOS / Android / Blackberry ).
jqPlot has come on in leaps and bounds recently.
A few stand out features from my point of view:
Proper implementation of rotated axis labels/text (Google charts can't do this)
Ability to plot many graph types including bubble and candlestick plots (like box and whisker plots)
jQuery based so easy to integrate if you are already using jQuery
Doesn't require an externally hosted API
Free
Features from their site:
Numerous chart style options.
Date axes with customizable formatting.
Up to 9 Y axes.
Rotated axis text.
Automatic trend line computation.
Tooltips and data point highlighting.
Sensible defaults for ease of use.
I am using jqPlot in a large project at the moment after trialling the following "competitors":
Protovis
amCharts
Google Charts
Highcharts JS
RGraph
PHPs GD lib
flot
And for fun here is a fully working ASCII pie chart written in pure SQL: http://code.openark.org/blog/mysql/sql-pie-chart
You can make an bar-graph relatively easy with php, html and css.
HTML/CSS part: As pointed out by Col. Shrapnel above:
It's as easy as elementary school math
and basic HTML just a couple divs
of this kind
<div style="background-color:black;width:50%;"> </div>
<div style="background-color:black;width:30%;"> </div>
<div style="background-color:black;width:20%;"> </div>
Custom bar images: If you would like a slightly fancier bars, you can use your own customs images, manipulated trough the width: CSS property of the < img /> tag.
The search query bellow contains at least 2 comprehensible and easy tutorials, on how to make your own bar graph with PHP/
google search for detailed tutorials
This approach should be less resource consuming on the end-user's computer, compared to JavaScript APIs.

Best open library for creating HTML 5/Javascript statistics page and charts

I am simply looking for the communities recommendation on an open library to help develop statistical charts, graphs, and maps for a website with HTML 5 / javascript. Something similar to what fusion charts does but without having to pay an arm and a leg and having access to the deep code.
Thank you everyone. :)
Flot and
Highcharts are both pretty decent. They both require JQuery.
Raphael is another great choice, supports all browsers including IE6.
jQuery + any number of plugins designed just for that.
The Filament group has been doing a lot of work on that:
http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/update_to_jquery_visualize_accessible_charts_with_html5_from_designing_with/
Take a look at Dojo Charting
It's very nice library for charting.
Check out Google's Visualization API.

PHP / AJAX toolkit to make a "live graph" (eg for tracing stock prices)

how do i (after getting the right stock prices from a source) show it on a "live graph". i'm looking for a php/ajax toolkit that allows me to create that graph live?
is that the right thing to use or a flash based solution is better?
are there 3rdparty sites that offer to create live graphs given input data?
Highcharts is probably what you need.
I recently started a new project to simplify the construction of a graph when using php:
http://aloiroberto.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/highcharts-php-library/
Also, Google Charts or Open Flash Chart are concrete possibilities (the latter will require Flash).
you can have a look at JPGRAPH. It is a wonderful library for creating wide variety of graphs.
As far as ajax is concerned this library outputs the graph as a picture file, so you can easily send the required parameters using ajax and build the graph dynamically using ajax.
PHPlot also is a free library: http://phplot.sourceforge.net, but compared to JPGraph it's rather limited. It also delivers a picture so you could grab that via AJAX and display it.
Birdeye has some incredibly powerful graphing tools. Check out the Birdeye Explorer to get a sense of what you can do with it.

Interactive SVG - Learning Resources?

Has anyone any reources for learning how to implement SVG with php/mysql (and possibly with php-gtk)? I am thinking of making a top-down garden designer, with drag and drop predefined elements (such as trees/bushes) and definable areas of planting (circles/squares). Gardeners could then track over time how well planting did in a certain area.
I don´t really want to get into flash...
I'm looking for a similar solution, and the two relevant questions here are Scripting SVG and Displaying vector graphics in a browser.
Neither of them give much hope, though, as each browser has different vector capabilities. Dojox.gfx appears to be a cross browser javascript graphics library which may do everything you need, but it won't necesarily do it in SVG. Canvas is gaining a lot of support and interest.
-Adam
Here's what I found I guess in some other question, not sure though.
raphael
It's a javascript library for working with svg.
There's an example, but try using browsershots to see if you are actually happy with the support of browsers (IE for example does not have native svg support).
Me personally have decided not to use svg, rather implement images + js solution as I don't think svg is supported enough nowadays.

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