In this recent post to the Duckout blog, they show you how to hook your PHP-based (and database driven) application into the Google Charting API for chart/graph generation.

I think, whenever we see a chart in a magazine, in books or applications our brain say’s to us Yeepie!!! Don’t read these stupid texts or tables! Just look at the green or yellow line and hope that they are above the other lines or hope that your opinion is the biggest part of the pie. This saves us a lot of work and in my opinion we should concentrate on drawing beautiful colorized pie charts, instead of writing long boring articles. But the question is: How do I draw these beautiful colorized pie charts? The simple answer is: you don’t have to, because google will draw them for you and you just have to tell them what to draw via the google charts api.

The sample application is a "breakfast rating" tool that logs the results to a MySQL database via PDO calls. The results are then extracted and formated as JSON to be compatible with the Google Charts API data handling. Some sample Javascript is included showing how to call the Charts API with your data and get back a simple line graphing of the data from the database. You can see the application in action here for reference.

PHPBuilder has another excerpt posted from the book "PHP 5 in Practice" from Sams Publishing. It takes a quick look at a method to simulate graphical charts with some XHTML and CSS tricks (and PHP's help).

When you need to present data in a chart on a web page, it is often worthwhile to generate graphical charts. This method is covered later in Section 18.4, "Creating a Graph/Chart Library"; however, sometimes for a quick chart CSS can suffice. Listing 9.4.1 presents a function that creates a visual chart of data using CSS and XHTML only.

You can find the code they're talking about for "Listing 9.4.1". They explain it briefly, but it's a quick "here's what it looks like" and less of a "here's the logic behind it" kind of post. Never the less, it's still quite useful.

PHPBuilder has another excerpt posted from the book "PHP 5 in Practice" from Sams Publishing. It takes a quick look at a method to simulate graphical charts with some XHTML and CSS tricks (and PHP's help).

When you need to present data in a chart on a web page, it is often worthwhile to generate graphical charts. This method is covered later in Section 18.4, "Creating a Graph/Chart Library"; however, sometimes for a quick chart CSS can suffice. Listing 9.4.1 presents a function that creates a visual chart of data using CSS and XHTML only.

You can find the code they're talking about for "Listing 9.4.1". They explain it briefly, but it's a quick "here's what it looks like" and less of a "here's the logic behind it" kind of post. Never the less, it's still quite useful.