Last modified: 2014-02-12 23:38:21 UTC
It's open source, it's powerful, flexible, full-featured, well-documented, vigorously maintained, and seems to be exactly what we need to replace Ploticus: http://phplot.sourceforge.net/ See also the suggestion for pChart: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23184
Would be neat to have this in SRF as well. (No need to replace ploticus, you can just as well have both). Have you checked out jqPlot yet?
I agree about the possibility of keeping both, but since it seems nobody is maintaining Ploticus, and it looks like it has been disabled for at least 2 years because of a security hole, I think it's time to Ploticus abandoned. I just took a look at jqPlot, and it is just as impressive as PHPlot, but with a completely different style. I think both jqPlot and PHPlot will appeal to SMW users in different circumstances. So far, only the bar chart and the pie chart seem to be implemented for jqPlot, even though it can do far more than that. I haven't looked at the documentation for it yet, but I'm guessing it would be straightforward to use the current SRF bar and pie code as a guide for gluing the other features into SRF. I might have a look at it later. Too bad I'm not a talented coder, I think it would be fun to get both jqPlot and PHPlot full feature sets incorporated into SRF. Since jqPlot has a flexible plugin architecture, it may be more complicated to make everything work with SRF. I'd have to look at how it's designed - maybe it's designed with a pattern that can be dealt with programmatically for all new features that plugins can provide, but I doubt it.
If you find resources in the form of dev time for this, I'd be happy to provide help and guidance on extending SRF. If you find funding, either I or several other people could implement this. You might even try writing the SMW list and see if anyone there also wants this feature. So for now I'm markings this as "later", due to lack of resources.
Do you have a guess of how much time it would take to fully implement both jqPlot and PHPlot (for a skilled programmer)? I think they would be a boon for SMW. If I get some down time, I might try to do it myself, but I would need help, and it would take a lot longer than what a real programmer could do. I only have the most basic grasp of PHP, and I know nothing about javascript. I asked last year about getting paid support for SMW just so I could get started, since the documentation wasn't good enough for a beginner back then. The documentation is much better now (I try to improve it when I can), so I've been able to get started after sitting on the sidelines for so long. But now it's hard to find someone who will help me with even the most basic questions unless I pay them enormous amounts of money that only a king can afford ($100+ per hour, or more).
I cannot give you such an estimate w/o having a closer look at both libraries and their components. But I'd say that in half a dozen to a dozen hours, you should be able to get in most stuff, assuming you know what you are doing, and assuming the libraries are structured in a sane manner.
[Removing RESOLVED LATER as discussed in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064240.html and announced in https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CALFVSbXkiffYy6HkhEWE0RtRrJ%2B2ebPz3g00gsr%2Bdz%2B1nZWsDA%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=semediawiki-devel . Reopening and setting priority to "Lowest". For future reference, please use either RESOLVED WONTFIX (for issues that will not be fixed), or simply set lowest priority. Thanks a lot!]
