Charts are an indispensable part of any data visualization work. People can grok visual representation of data easily than a textual variety. Today there are a huge number of free chart libraries available to display visualizations on websites. Below is a small list of some of the libraries available for displaying charts using php.

His list of six includes the following:

• Visifire
• PHP-SWF
• Open Flash Chart
• eZ Graph component of the eZ components framework

In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to PHP/SWF Charts, a great solution for building PHP- and Flash-driven charts. PHP/SWF supports a wide variety of charting formats, including bar, candlestick, 3D columns, pie, 3D pie, and advanced charts such as scatter, polar, and composites. See the maani.us PHP/SWF gallery for a great compilation of examples.

They focus mainly on a bar chart to keep things simple. They show how to install the software (dead easy) and how to create a simple first chart complete with a graphic to illustrate. Flat charts are nice, but they show some of the real power of the library by transforming it into a 3D bar graph, giving the columns some depth and all it really takes is changing the chart type.

Okay, for a project at work I was asked to add graphs to some of the reports I'd already created. So I looked around for solutions for graphing in PHP and stumbled upon PHP/SWF Charts as a solution.

He walks you through the installation (a simple unpacking) and the code that he used to get things set up and working, inluding his custom controller. His GraphsController functions the same way as any other controller, but uses a single action function to encapsulate the generation of the chart. This is then pushed out to the view where the PHP/SWF Charts system is implemented.