On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 6:42 PM, John Lenz <lenz@math.uic.edu> wrote:
HTML5 Canvas is great for charts. If you go this route you might as well use a library which draws charts for you instead of writing all this code yourself.
Personally, I use extjs version 4 which has some amazing charts, but there are other libraries out there.
http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/#sample-3
Essentially the server provides the data in JSON or XML some other format, and the extjs code draws the charts on the client side.
If you go with extjs, then the server side I would suggest a small, simple yesod or snap server. You could probably get the server under a hundred lines of code with yesod; see some of the examples in the yesod book. yesod or snap would serve JSON of the statistics on request, and also serve the javascript files which draw the charts.
I prefer using Turing complete PL to program web client, like the one used in GWT (Java) or Cappuccino (Objective-J). http://cappuccino.org/learn/<!-- <a href=@{Page1R}>Go to page 1! -->