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Technology for live graphs in a browser

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by dan cooperstock

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I may need to display live graphs in a browser, i.e. ones that are regularly updating based on information received from a back-end data source of some type. The updated data could probably be made available in any form desired, such as database table data, an XML feed, or perhaps even newly generated grapics for the graph being constantly refreshed.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best do this? Options that occur to me include Java applets, something done with Flash, and repeatedly generated graphics from the back end, as mentioned above. (Though I would expect the graphics solution would be too expensive in terms of bandwidth.)

Any advice? I'm interested in advice both on the display technology for the front end, and the communications technology to use between it and the back end. Thanks.

3 replies

by dan cooperstock

JFreeChart looks like it's probably a good tool for generating graphics files containing graphs. (This is a fairly expensive way to display a graph in a browser, mind you, compared to passing the data to be graphed to some client-side technology that displays the graph.)

What I don't see here, and what I was primarily asking about, is how to get that graph to constantly refresh itself, based on updated back-end data. Any bright ideas?

by brangela

If you already have a license for Microsoft SQL Server 2000, you can use Reporting Services. It allows you to have live data access or scheduled data refreshes for your report / graph. Client side application runs through IE.

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