Webapps for MySQL-based charts?

December 5, 2012 7:29 PM

You want to create a web dashboard with some pretty charts based on data in an existing MySQL database. What do you use?

I'm comfortable with PHP, Javascript, Symphony, JQuery, etc., and while I can certainly build my own one-off thing, surely there's a few open-source projects kicking around out there that have done this more effectively.

Ideally something into which I can thrown a bunch of SQL queries, then create charts based on those results (bar, line, pie, etc.). I do not need a giant Business Intelligence / Ad-Hoc reporting system.

The environment is a typical LAMP server, so it needs to be something I host myself, rather than a service.

posted by odinsdream to computers & internet (10 answers total)

D3.js + Ajax requests to your database. It's all client-side, except for your database and web service code.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:59 PM on December 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

There's Ducksboard (which is pretty and has its own API and most certainly can work off of your databases), but for stuff you host yourself, look at jSlate (which is open source) and Graphene.
posted by suedehead at 8:06 PM on December 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

D3 is great but has a fairly steep learning curve. Highcharts and Flot are pretty great as well.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:19 PM on December 5, 2012

Flot.js. Free, easy to pick up, decent documentation, plenty of examples.
posted by boombot at 1:00 AM on December 6, 2012

Google charts - hands down simple, attractive awesome and free.
posted by the noob at 3:01 AM on December 6, 2012

google charts is a bit underpowered compared to highcharts.
posted by carlodio at 4:31 AM on December 6, 2012

Thanks everyone. While I'm comfortable building one-offs from any charting library manually, I'm looking for some kind of interface into which these things can be built by feeding in SQL queries in a web interface of some kind and saving those for re-use.
posted by odinsdream at 7:24 AM on December 6, 2012

Wow, Ducksboard is awesome. This is almost perfect. I can put a few scripts in a cron job to feed data into the dashboards, which anyone can build and adjust, while letting the Ducksboard system do the heavy lifting on graphics, trending and layout. Perfect.
posted by odinsdream at 11:56 AM on December 6, 2012

The company I work for released Dashing, I know very little about technical stuff, but people seem to like it and we use it extensively around the office.
posted by dripdripdrop at 12:20 PM on December 6, 2012

Ooooooh!
posted by odinsdream at 1:33 PM on December 6, 2012