When I compiled PHP on my LinuxPPC box, I didn't have GD installed and didn't want to add another layer of complexity by compiling it in. GD will let you do all kinds of cool things - creating gifs, complex charts, etc, if you use libraries from the Sample Code Archive here on this site and PHP's built in functionality.

I didn't want the lack of GD to stifle me too much, so I started hunting around for a way to generate html-based graphs and charts. Fortunately, someone had already gone to the trouble of writing up a class to handle that. Phil Davis at WebGuys provided a nifty class called HTML_Graphs.

At first, I was a little taken back by the complexity of the class. It does all kinds of things, from vertical bar charts to multiple horizontal bar charts. Because I knew I was going to use the class a lot, I spent some time creating a couple of wrapper functions.

Many of the functions of the class don't need to be used for basic graphing, which is what I am showing here. For instance, I don't see any need to go into detail on creating multiple charts at once. And vertical charts are created as easily as horizontal charts - just change the "type" parameter in the GraphIt() function that I detail elsewhere.

So let's get started. I will at first lay out the functions I have written, and then we'll talk about a specific use for them.