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pChart PHP 5 Compatibility

pChart is a great charting library for PHP. However, it has not been updated in a long time and it's compatibility with PHP 5 will soon be lost because of new language features (namely constuctors can no longer be the class name as of PHP 5.3.3)

Goals

The goal of this project is:

  • Update pChart to use PHP 5 object-oriented language features
  • Fix bugs
  • Refactor as needed
  • Add proper docblocks to all functions (and there's a lot of them)
  • Attempt to maintain compatibility with existing scripts (i.e. do not rename/remove any public functions)
  • Rename some functions but keep references to existing (it seems the original author's native language was not english)

Status

The main body of the code now has over 75% unit test coverage, and all the examples appear to be working. If you're starting a new project, it's probably reasonable to use this distribution in preference to the Sourceforge distribution, since any bugs in this distribution should hopefully be fixed on a reasonable timescale.

Code cleanup

The code has some questionable style issues, most noticeably inconsistent use of camel casing for method names. This isn't a particularly big deal in itself, since method names are case-insensitive, but we aim to clean it up as part of this project.

Development versions

There are currently two development branches, both of which are usable but may not be relied upon not to change in the future:

  • v2 is an attempt to rewrite the API to a more modern, Object-Oriented style. This API is currently still unstable, though the code is unit-tested and should be pretty functional, so if you're happy fixing your own bugs or updating the API as it changes, this could be usable. I intend soon to do a release branch that will be kept up to date with bug fixes
  • gdline is an experimental optimisation that uses the native GD line drawing rather than drawing pixel-by-pixel. It is substantially faster (400% in some cases) but doesn't have antialiasing or drop-shadows working. It's based off the v1 API. Eventually I intend to incorporate these improvements in as optional speedups to the main branch, but for now if you need speed and don't care too much about prettiness, this is a viable option.

Future development

I've been pondering switching to Cairo over GD as the rendering engine, since the support for antialiasing doesn't seem to be reliably present on PHP. This probably won't happen until after a release of the v2 API branch has gone out, at the very least.