[ubuntu-uk] FLOSS solution for graphing in PHP

[Mark Jose]

On Friday 22 June 2007 18:36, Mark Harrison wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've got what I thought would be a simple problem, and google is not
> being my friend this afternoon.
>
> I have a database (MySQL5), and a webserver (Apache), and a programming
> language that lets me extract info from one and display it with the
> other (PHP5.) These all run on a nice friendly thing you may have heard
> of called Ubuntu :-)
>
>
> What I'm after is a free (in both senses) "thing" (library, probably),
> that can grab some data, and turn it into a pretty-looking bar graph. I
> don't mind particularly how it outputs the graph provided it's something
> that can display within Firefox, so something that could dynamically
> build a PNG or a Flash, or whatever really.
>
> However, Google has let me down - lots of chargeable libraries, but
> adding the search term "free" gives me "free trial, $69 to buy" or the
> like results.
>
>
> Has anyone any personal recommendations?
>
> M.

rrdtool  - takes a bit of getting the hang of, but will take data e.g 
temperatures - and output as graphs.
Have a look at my brother in laws temperature graphs - 

http://www.hoagieshouse.com/temperature/

Thats the sort of thing you get - you can of course tweak them a bit too.
A cron job gets the data every x seconds and adds the next point to your 
graph.

Mark