The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today (from Vikram Vaswani) that focuses on making charts and graphs with the help of the GDChart extension for PHP.

This extension, which is freely available from PECL, can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in dynamically generating graphical representations of numerical data at run-time. Over the next few pages, I'll introduce you to this extension, illustrating its important features and showing you just how easy it is to get your Friday evening back.

The tutorial shows how to get and install the extension as well as including a few usage examples - a simple charting of values (with the different chart types defined), comparing more than one set of data, changing the aesthetics of the output and a detailed look at a few of the chart types' output.

Jack Herrington has posted a new tutorial to the Zend Developer Zone today showing how to combine PHP, your database of choice and Flex to create a dashboard in your application.

Let's face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday.

He shows how to create a simple Flex application that takes in XML data (from whatever backend, he uses a PHP script that uses DOM) and displays the information - his sample traffic data - as a graph. This graph is an extension of the Elixir library from ILOG and makes dropping information into graphs and charts simple.

Screenshots of the Flex side of things and code for the PHP side are both provided.

On his blog, Andreas Gohr has posted about various charting applications on the web (in his search for a way to show off the stats for DokuWiki) and looking specifically at the Google Charts.

Because such [popularity] data is much better to comprehend when accompanied by some nice graphs, I had a look at the Google Chart API today.

He also mentions three wrapper libraries that help your apps interface with the Charts API. Of course, he also includes some graphs of the popularity stats showing things like web server usage and PHP versions.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

Developer.com has a new tutorial posted today about using the PHP/SWF charting system to graph your data:

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.

On PHPBuilder.com, there's a new article that takes a look at the recently introduced (well, relatively recent) combination of Flex from Adobe and PHP to create rich internet applications.

Unlike HTML and the endless number of limitations it presents, Adobe Flex provides an intuitive environment with a vast number of options. There is a large variety of events and styles that far exceed what is available with custom coding in Javascript and CSS. [...] The purpose of this article is not to familiarize you with Adobe Flex, but to demonstrate its integration with PHP.

They introduce the concept of integration with a simple little script first - a "click me" button that makes "Hello world" appear when clicked. With that knowledge in place, they move to something a little more complex - the creation of a dynamic chart from database information (code included).

Kore Nordmann points out an article that he's written up about the new ezcGraph component as a part of the eZ Component system.

From the article over on ez.no:

Among the additions to the latest eZ Components 2006.2 release is the Graph component, which enables you to create bar, line and pie charts. The output driver mechanism allows you to create different image file types from each chart, and the available renderers make the chart output customizable from simple two-dimensional charts to beautiful three-dimensional data projections.

His introduction covers what the functionality of the component is, what chart types you can make with it (with code examples), and the options for customization it makes possible. He also includes links to a tutorial on its use and the API documentation for you to pick through.

In a recent post to his blog, Mike Bernat gets down to basics with one of the key pieces of functionality in PHP data persistence - cookies vs. sessions.

Knowing the basics of cookies and sessions is essential to any successful PHP programmer. It is useful to store pieces information on the users computer for later use. Things like when they last visited, language of choice, age, etc. Cookies and Sessions are the perfect solution to our needs.

He talks about both, including demonstration code to clarify some points and a chart at the end to compare their features, strengths, and weaknesses.

Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.

The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.

There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.

On his blog today, Chris Hartjes has posted a tutorial about getting charts, specifically SWF charts generated with PHP, into your CakePHP application.

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.