[UPHPU] Graphs

[Mac Newbold]

Today at 3:34pm, Scott.Hill at flyingj.com said:

> What I would like to avoid is using things like flash or
> images.  I don't know much about PHP GD but it seems that generating images
> on the fly would be too slow.  Does anyone have any experience with GD
> directly?

Yes, we use GD all the time. Two things:

a) it's way faster than you think. I don't think I've ever seen one of our 
GD images take more than a small fraction of a second. You wouldn't be 
able to time them with a stopwatch if you tried. Ours range from simple 
text rendering with TTF fonts to fancy bar graphs, and they'll all so fast 
you can't tell the difference with a non-dynamic image.

b) with a little bit of php magic, you can add some code that will make 
your images cacheable, if they usually return the same image, so that they 
won't have to get reloaded all the time.

We've been very happy with GD for everything we've used it for. Besides 
TJ's thing (which looks very cool), there are other quick-and-dirty 
scripts out there to use too. One of the bar graph generators we tried was 
only about 30 lines of code or something, and worked quite well.

Mac

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Mac Newbold		MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
mac at macnewbold.com	http://www.macnewbold.com/