Flash/PHP graphing

Yesterday I stumbled across a great library for generating Flash graphs easily with PHP. PHP/SWF Charts can add a bit of interactivity to data visualization with its ability to display data values on mouseovers, and create linkable regions of your graphs. This functionality could be replicated with HTML image maps and Javascript of course, but I’m not aware of any GD compatible libraries that do so right now. Also, it can provide some transition animations as well, which you can choose to love or hate.

The core of the library is the Flash development, as there are several flavors of the package geared towards languages other than PHP. The provided PHP just generates XML for the Flash files to import and render from a rather verbose associative array. It’s a handy alternative to static packages like JpGraph.