Do Interactive plotting tools for a website exist?

[Alex Martelli]

"Chris Arai" <chris at araidesign.com> wrote in message
news:39BDD102.A9002C6A at araidesign.com...
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to create a web page that will allow users to input data and
> then have a cgi script plot it for them and do other calculations.  My
> original thought was to use Python to grab data from a form, crunch it
> and then plot it.  Are there any plotting tools that will allow me to
> create graphs in browser viewable format?

Depends on what browsers you need to support.  Unfortunately, if you
need to support _all_ browsers you'll probably need to plot on a GIF
and send that (PIDDLE and PIL should support that well in Python).
There are better ways than a GIF to represent line graphics and send
it from server to client, but not all browsers will support them,
alas.  If you can use those (even just as an option at client's
choice), different back-ends to PIDDLE should support that as well
as possible (with minimal disruption to the end of your code), so
Python would still be an excellent choice.  I think there may be
even higher, easier-to-use strata on top of PIDDLE, but I don't know
much about those (maybe you can drive gnuplot and have _it_ output
a GIF...?  dunno, but you may want to look into it).


> Or are there any tools that will allow me to do this directly, with out
> writing the cgi script myself (I'm doubtful)??

Sorry, I don't know of any tools you can buy today that will just
let you do all of this without programming (there may be; it's such
a huge market, who can know even a significant fraction of it...).


Alex