HiSPARC/publicdb — Issue #11: Consider changing plotting engine to javascript
Author: 153957
Created: 2012-03-06 15:17:11+00:00
State: open

Currently the server has to generate each plot (unless already in cache) when someone requests to see it.

The problems with this are:
- it is costs the server some cpu time to calculate these images
- the images take up storage on the server (or more cpu if they have to be regenerated every time)
- sending the images takes bandwidth, and time on slow connections
- it also means that if we want to make a change to some plot the server will have to dump the entire cache

If we use a Javascript library (like flot or jqplot):
- we only need to send the javascript libraries once, they will be cached by browsers and reused on all pages
- then we only need to send them the numbers (arrays) required to make the plots and the script/functions that determine how the plots must look.
- the plots can be made interactive

At the moment I see one problem with this:
- the plots can no longer be easily be downloaded, since they are no longer simple images (use screenshots..)