On Wednesday 05 March 2003 19:47, Michael Nachbaur wrote: > I'm interested in creating an XSP taglib for interfacing with > GD::Graph that would allow you to define any type of graph capable of > being created in GD::Graph, but with an XML syntax.
Neat! I wasn't aware of GD::Graph before I saw your post, but I find the idea pretty neat. However, SVG seems to be the way to express vector graphics, so my immidiate reaction (this feels a bit like /. karmawhoring) was "how does SVG fit into all this?" GD::Graph doesn't output SVG, does it? Then, I thought that for portability (at least) when expressing graphics in XML it would be nice to express it in SVG. But OTOH, SVG for input make perhaps little sense in this case because is SVG too low-level for this purpose? A perhaps better idea that has been on my mind for some time is to interface AxKit with R, my favorite scientific computing system, that is, it is "A language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.": http://www.r-project.org/ On the top of R, you have the Omega project, http://www.omegahat.org/ Both these projects are driven by some of the foremost researchers in (numerical) statistical computing in the world, and it is making huge progress. One of the things that they're working on is XML input and output. I have not actually looked at these modules, but it seems to be quite interesting. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that they have considerable experience with expressing graphs, possibly in XML, so perhaps it is worth looking at what they've done, and what they are working on. What I have in mind is mostly that if need be, people could make use of the powerful R engine to draw their graphs, and an effortless transition to and from GD::Graph to R would be an interesting feature. There is also an RSPerl module on Omegahat, so a quick hack to get R into AxKit might be quite easy. The reason why I haven't looked into it is that I just haven't had any use for it, but it would have been really cool... :-) Cheers, Kjetil -- Kjetil Kjernsmo Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
