

Ask HN: What's the best way to graph stuff on web sites? - sh1mmer

So I've been picking through the various frameworks for displaying graphs (Google Charts, Yahoo Charts, Flot, etc). There are lots of possibilities but they all seem bare-bones to me. In that you need to do a fair amount of data manipulation before you can start using one.<p>The real challenge I'm having is hooking up my data to a model to present a sensible visualization. One of my primary sets of data is a series of response times. I want to throw the series of times (in milli-seconds for example) at an API which will create the a graph of the best trend to represent that data.<p>I've been trying to brush off my college statistic to hand roll something, but maybe someone knows a better way...
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makecheck
I think the gnuplot port (uses HTML 5 canvas) is impressive:
[http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/~merritt/gnuplot/canvas_dem...](http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/~merritt/gnuplot/canvas_demos/)

Of course, it's a question of how widespread HTML 5 canvas support will be, in
the timeframe that you need.

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gaius
I assume by _a graph of the best trend_ you mean fitting a curve.
NumPy/Matplotlib is probably the easiest, look at the polyfit function.

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timf
Seconded. I have a rough polyfit script, I threw it online as an example:

<http://github.com/timf/polyfit-example/tree/master>

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timf
updated with sample output pic

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gaius
Python makes everything easy :-)

