phpguru.org - Richard Heyes' ramblings and code http://www.phpguru.org/ Quality PHP and Javascript code, along with a mild smattering of humour. Also second home of the RGraph HTML5 canvas graph library. 5th June 2010 RGraph release http://www.phpguru.org/article/475 Sun, 06 Jun 2010 01:56:57 +0100 Not too many changes this week:
  • Added properties to the Horizontal Bar chart: chart.title.xaxis, chart.title.yaxis, chart.title.xaxis.pos, chart.title.yaxis.pos
  • Slightly increased the area recognised to initiate resizing the Rose (ie the size of the hotspot)
  • Added adjusting to the TRadar

On a separate note - I've updated the HTML5 GeoLocation example with an embedded Google map. This will probably be more useful to you. Also, if you have the Google Toolbar installed, MSIE appears to have GeoLocation support (!).]]> 27th February RGraph release http://www.phpguru.org/article/454 Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:03:04 +0000 Todays release is a little later in the day due to pesky social commitments. Tut. Anyhoo, this release includes:

  • Added information about the coords array.
  • Added information about dynamically updating your graphs.
  • Zoom in canvas mode now has a dark background option - chart.zoom.background - can be true or false and defaults to true. Note: If you use the full canvas zoom, this will affect you - if you don't like it, you will need to turn it off.
  • Added RGraph_zoomed_canvas CSS class. Also tweaked the default CSS for the two types of zoom.
  • Tweaked the animation example.
  • You can now stipulate two colors instead of one for the line chart (one for up, and one for down). For an example of this, see the last line chart example.
Go to the RGraph website »]]> German (& now French) government warns against using Microsoft Internet Explorer http://www.phpguru.org/article/446 Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:55:49 +0000 Not because it's "a bit whiffy", but because of recent security concerns. Full news story here. If you choose to upgrade to Google Chrome, for example, you will find it to be far, far faster, and it has better support for emerging technologies, like HTML5.]]> 5th December RGraph release http://www.phpguru.org/article/439 Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:16:06 +0000 This release adds a new variant on the traditional Scatter chart - the boxplot diagram. The scatter chart example page shows this. This can be used to (for example) display ranges in data. Other changes include:
  • Added a new function - RGraph.Async() - which can be used to further increase the speed of your pages.
  • Removed text support for Opera. The graphs are still displayed, albeit without text
  • Changed to object detection in place of specific browser detection for older browsers. This means more browsers are accounted for.
  • Added RGraph.getSegment() function, which is used for the Donut, Pie and Radar charts to get segment details.
  • Added ability to do Barplots using the Scatter chart.
  • You can now specify the scatter to not display tick marks (by specifying the tickmark as null)
]]> August 8th RGraph release http://www.phpguru.org/article/424 Sat, 08 Aug 2009 10:22:49 +0100 A somewhat minor release today - ie not a lot of changes. The most exciting (?) are:
  • Added pseudo 3D effect to grouped, stacked and regular bar charts [example page].
  • Can now specify the grid width for the Gantt chart.
  • The LED grid now strips extraneous right hand white-space.
]]> Chrome 1.0 released http://www.phpguru.org/article/368 Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:33:20 +0000 In a surprising move (to me at least), Google has today bumped Chrome from 0.4 to 1.0 and removed the beta tag. Not that I think it's a bad move - any move that diminishes MSIEs market share or encourages MS to bring it up to date is a good one. Surprising though because Googles approach in the past has been one of keeping things in beta for a long time. Gmail for example, has been in beta for a long long time. Over two years IIRC. So I was kinda expecting Chrome to be in beta for the next decade. Perhaps more of a marketing type move as opposed to a technical one. Isn't that a cynical thought...?]]> RGraph: HTML5 canvas graph library http://www.phpguru.org/article/330 Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:09:53 +0100 I've decided to unify my HTML5 canvas graphs into a single library called RGraph (And my name is Richard - what a coincidence!). Should make life much easier for you when you're trying to implement them, it being much more straight-forward. And eventually I will make the APIs the same, or at least very similar.

Why should you care?

Compared with traditional server based graphing libraries, RGraph takes advantage of the HTML5 features which are already part of most modern browsers (notably excepting MSIE) running on each individual client, thereby reducing the load/stress on your server dramatically.

Imagine, you are creating 100,000 graphs a day and the data is such that the result cannot be cached. With the RGraph library you reduce that figure to zero. All the processing and graph creation is done by each individual client, much like showing the HTML you send.

You should be aware that Internet Explorer does not support the CANVAS tag yet*, so this library cannot really be considered if MSIE compatibility is needed. Face it, that's the vast majority of the time. Someday Internet Explorer will (hopefully) support the canvas tag, and therefore this library will work fine. If not, then it's going to be a short wait to the next version. What with Google Chrome appearing (which supports canvas just fine), it may be a shorter wait than originally thought...

For website admin areas, along with intranets, where you can control the end users browser (or at least stipulate it), this library will be just fine.

* Intenet Explorer 8 is now supported by way of the ExCanvas library. Read more about it here.
** Internet Explorer 9 has canvas support starting from preview 3]]>