Re^2: An alternative for Gd?

[atemerev]

Since it's going to be a public service with (hopefully) heavy loads, I don't think deferring chart processing to Google Charts is a good idea. Or it is? Have to check first.

[renodino]

If by public service, you mean browser based, perhaps you should bypass Perl for a purely browser based, Javascripted solution, namely, <canvas>. In which case, not only do you avoid the hit for pushing the data to Google, you can actually avoid the hit for processing in your server, and let the browser do the rendering.

<canvas> does have some issues (no native text drawing, no native IE support, hard to get static copies of the image, etc.), but its a fairly serviceable solution.

Here's some pointers:

• canvas tutorial at Mozilla Dev Center
• excanvas and moocanvas for IE
• Capturing a canvas image
• (Shameless self promotion) PlotJax - still very alpha, but supports gestures
• (More shameless self promotion) Shodo for drawing text in a canvas

[samtregar]

Google seems to be pretty good at supporting heavy load! Lots of heavy traffic sites use their free Google Maps service, for example. There's no limit on usage, but they do ask that you inform them if you expect to generate more than 250,000 charts per day (!).

-sam