Interactive Javascript + Canvas (Flot) powered graphs

[John Ralls]

On Jan 20, 2011, at 4:56 PM, Andy Clayton wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've been playing around with using Flot (http://code.google.com/p/flot/) to replace the goffice report graphs, and it seems to work well. It (re?)introduces interactivity and overall looks much more modern. It's rather clean too, as the existing guile modules are simply changed to output the relevant javascript instead of the <object> tag. So two questions:
> 
> * Would such an approach be considered for inclusion in trunk? If so, then I'll cleanup my patches and post/attach to a bug for comments. Or would a different approach be preferred?
> 
> * Assuming inclusion would there be support for dropping goffice and gtkhtml? Remember this would be trunk/2.6, not 2.4.x. While it would be easy enough to have the guile modules switch between their current output and the JS output depending on if webkit is enabled, I'm not sure that is the best choice. The biggest reason I see for removing them is to keep a more cohesive product. It avoids issues where users need to wonder "Do I have the gnucash with the new graphs?" or "Why does this review/tutorial/blog's gnucash have sexy graphs while mine are blah?". In addition dropping unnecessary dependencies and code, thereby lowering maintenance and duplicated development effort, always seems like a good thing.

ISTM that it would make more sense to not have the scheme (guile) intermediation and to do everything in javascript.
Otherwise, +1.

Regards,
John Ralls