SVG 2D Graphics Research
Business Charts Architecture

Business Charts

It is worth remembering that SVG is not the whole answer. SVG should enable you to make better business documents as a whole, so that your documents have graphics in them in a naturally expressive way, for optimum communication.

SVG is really good for business charts. Chart graphics in SVG are typically very, very compact, for super-fast picture download. Because the graphics are produced on demand, charts are right up-to-date. Whenever you fetch the document from the server, the chart is produced afresh. And because SVG can be embedded in XHTML, HTML and XML, you can create the documents you want from your data.

Your business data constantly changes, and you are used to the advantages of non-graphical data being produced 'now'. But in many systems documents that include graphics are only produced every few hours/days, because your IT department use a spreadsheet for graphics. That's weak. Server-side Graphics Apps and SVG bring proper timeliness to graphics documents.

Remember reading about 'good' information being "Up-to-date"? This SVG 2D graphics architecture provides it.

Assume

• That your business data is held in a database
• That you are composing a business document and you want both text and graphics to be from live data.
• That your server side DP App is written in PHP (this works as well for Perl, java etc).

This is how it works.

1. A PHP script runs server-side, executing an SQL query to retrieve report data
2. The same PHP script runs a Graphics App (PenDraw is ideal for that), passing it the data for the graphics, and the name of a file to write the SVG into. (It can use tempnam( ) function to generate a unique new name)
3. The Graphics App produces the SVG, puts it in the file, and returns control to PHP.
4. the PHP script reads the file (readilfe( ) function reads it in one go) produces all the XHTML, including the SVG as an <object> (and can include any number of SVG charts, of course, with each chart its own <object>).

Browser Zoom and Pan enable the user to explore the chart without further server-side intervention.

Remember, your SVG graphics can also be interactive. Each graphical element can respond to the mouse, and you can program client-side in javascript or VBscript, and pass interactive moves made by the user back to another server-side script. The potential is enormous.

Remember, too, that any part of the SVG graphics picture can act as a hyper link, so you can construct documents that have rich semantic structures, and offer the user natural and helpful interfaces.