Hello:
On Tue, 03 Mar 2009, Travis C. Brooks wrote:
> http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/6-jquery-chart-plugins-reviewed/
>
> Some jQuery plug-ins for plotting, which would spruce up the citation
> plots on papers, in particular the sparklines might be really cool in
> a brief format...
While it would be certainly good to have e.g. Flot's zooming feature
available for the citation graphs, we shall have to see how fast these
things are for the most cited papers (when they have to paint 3000+
points), and what strain would they bring on the server; especially if
sparklines would be called for every record on the search results page.
Stress-wise I guess we might be relatively fine if we start caching
the {(X1,Y1),(X2,Y2),...} JSON structures that these tools need, just
as we are caching the PNGs produced by gnuplot. Although caching PNGs
would still be nice to have client-side-electricity-bill-wise, because
the number of reads is typically much higher than the number of graph
changes per week, so it would make sence to pre-generate and pre-store
graphs for our readers in some way. Ideally, there should be some
jQuery tool that would enable us to save the graph in a PNG file, then
we could run some background daemon to cache graphs as PNGs if we
want. And, when a user zooms or otherwise clicks on the offered
graph, we would switch to the real time interactive Ajax mode. Hmm, a
music of the future, it would seem?
Anyway, for admin-like graphs such as various system statistics plotted
by the WebStat module, the jQuery way of doing things seems very
natural, as there is not much caching we need to do, and interactive
features such as zooming in and out would be profitable to the humans
even more here.
Joaquim (CC-ed), who's developing BibCirculation, is going to attack the
generation of borrowers/items statistics real soon now, so perhaps he
can start directly with these tools to test them out, maybe starting
with Flot?
Best regards
--
Tibor Simko ** CERN Document Server ** <http://cds.cern.ch/>
