NYCPHP Meetup

[Faber Fedor]

I'm not sure if this is on-topic for this group, but I'm sure I'll hear
about it if it isn't. :-)

One of my clients has hired a third-party vendor to write a graphical
front-end to the database that I'm constructing.  It's not an admin
tool; it's more of a graphical report-generator.  

Example usage: You click on a link and up pops a graph of the stock 
market and several indices for the past week. Click on the red index
line anywhere in the Tuesday area and a graph appears showing just that 
index on an hourly basis for Tuesday.

The third party vendor is doing this under a legacy operating system
(and I'm going to have to tie it in to MySQL running on RHEL 3! Oh
joy!).  

I was wondering how you would do this under F/OSS? Would it make sense
to do this in PHP on the backend?  How would you do the drill-downs? I'm
thinking maybe XUL on the front-end making database calls via XML-RPC
but how would you generate new graphics?

I think something like this would go over *very well* in business, but I
haven't seen the technology in F/OSS to allow it. Are there
libraries/PEAR packages/CPAN modules/etc. that would make this
(relatively) easy for a developer to slap together?

-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber                     

Linux New Jersey: Open Source Solutions for New Jersey
http://www.linuxnj.com