• Posted by Peter Haza
  • On April 21, 2008

  • Filed under PHP

  • No Comments

New google charts wrapper in PHP

I’ve been doing a freelance project for a while for one of the biggest media corporations in Norway. Without going into details it involves tying together a lot of data and make it available on a map. I’m building the back-end for this thing, and it needs to support charts and diagrams.

In the old days I would implements the “plotter” in GD2, using PHPs excellent api, but since then Google have released their charts api which basically means you send a GET request to Google’s servers, and get an image/plot back.

This is all fine and dandy, but it gets tedious to build the GET parameters every time. So then I decided to go look for a nice PHP wrapper for this api. While I did find some interesting ones, I decided to start my own. This because I found the other frameworks lacking, either because they serve a different purpose(like being very easy to use(1file)), or because they used an approach I didn’t feel comfortable with.

Anyway. Feel free to contribute with code or comment comments. I do plan on eventually to support the whole api, but it will come in bits and pieces as I need them. First out is barchart which is nearly done already!

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