Hi,
A couple of weeks ago, I asked for advice on rendering graphics in PHP
for display in a web client.
I had a go at a few of the things suggested, before stumbling across an
alternative solution.
The application was an Extranet where I can make a bunch of assumptions
about the desktop - so I assumed that everyone was using Firefox! This
proved to be true apart from the accountant - to cut a long story short,
he now has FF on his (XP) desktop, though IE is still his default. (The
struggle continues.)
Anyway, once I no longer had to write browser-independent code, I
decided to try SVG, the W3C graphics format.
- The good news - it does exactly what I want, it has the drawing
primitives for things like rectangle, which allowed a fine-grained
control over graph layout.
- The better news - SVG support is native in Firefox 2...
- The bad news - ... as an object/ :-(
Alas, FF2 doesn't support SVG as an img type, so I can't just use it
in-line. However, there is talk of someone submitting this functionality
as a Summer of Code project, which would be kind of nice. If that fails,
it's definitely near the top of the feature request list for FF3.
Anyway, the solution works very, very, well
The way it now works is that there's a PHP page called
customer-graphics.php which starts with:
?php
header('Content-Type: image/svg+xml');
?
Then goes on to start:
svg xmlns=http://www.w3.org/2000/svg;
xmlns:xlink=http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink;
version=1.1
baseProfile=full
g fill-opacity=0.7 stroke=black stroke-width=0.02cm
Before having lots of PHP along the lines of :
echo rect width=\$xwidth\ height=\$Total\ x=\$xcurrent\
y=\$ystart\ fill=\$actualcol\/;
... where, obviously $xwidth, $xcurrent, $Total, $ystart, and $actual
col are variables set inside a loop (actually one that grabs a dataset
out of a MySQL5 stored procedure.)
I hope that all you programmers are impressed that I even have a
variable declaration block that specifies fill colour, rather than
typing a colour in-line :-)
The code then finishes:
/g
/svg
M.
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