Has anyone successfully rendered jqPlot charts as images server-side (e.g. with node.js)?

Question

Unfortunately my organisation is stuck with IE6 for while yet (yeah, I know...).

I love jqPlot but find that IE6 doesn't feel the same way about it. So, tired of trying to work around the many failings and memory leaks of IE6, I thought I'd circumvent the problem by producing images (perhaps PNGs) of charts on the server. For my purposes, the interactive nature of client side charts aren't as useful as the ability to produce a cache of chart images on the server and put less stress on IE6 It would also neatly solve the issue that jqPlot output doesn't print properly from IE6 (I'm guessing that might be an excanvas issue).

But the trouble is, none of the server side solutions that I've found can match the visual/aesthetic appeal of jqPlot. Server-side, I'm most comfortable with Perl and the stuff available on CPAN ranges from the functional but fugly (e.g. Chart::Gnuplot) to the beautiful but unobtainable (e.g. Chart::Clicker, which has a zillion prerequisites and didn't want to install for me on Windows/ActiveState Perl even after a week of trying).

Google tells me that a few people might have tried using node.js to generate PNGs from jqPlot on the server, but I couldn't find any evidence that anyone has succeeded. I've not used node.js before so would like a little reassurance that I'm not attempting the impossible before I attempt the node.js/jsdom learning curve...

Any advice you could give would be appreciated (apart from "upgrade the browser" - that will happen eventually, but not for the foreseeable).

See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12182598/jqplot-as-image — Ross Rogers, May 06 '13 at 18:29

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 01 '13 at 21:05

2

There is a way of doing this using Node.js library. Please refer to this blog: http://blog.davidpadbury.com/2010/10/03/using-nodejs-to-render-js-charts-on-server/

answered Apr 01 '13 at 21:05

Amit Tikoo

167
6

i tried to use node.js for jqplot but couldn't get it working. i got a blank chart as the CSS stylesheet used by jqplot cannot be loaded into node.js. – netguy May 27 '15 at 07:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 09 '12 at 10:07

0

Possible workaround would be webkit2png which is a headless webkit-based browser that will save a screenshot of a page (or presumably just part in your case) as an image-file. Not pretty, but might be the simplest solution.

answered Mar 09 '12 at 10:07

Richard Huxton

21,516
3
39
51

In Perl: [Gtk3::WebKit](http://p3rl.org/Gtk3::WebKit) ([code examples](https://github.com/potyl/Webkit)) – daxim Mar 09 '12 at 10:37
@Richard - thanks! I hadn't explored that avenue either yet, but it's an alternative to think about. – GainfulShrimp Mar 13 '12 at 16:51
@daxim - Cheers for that. Will take a look now as I'm sure I'll find that module useful at some point. – GainfulShrimp Mar 13 '12 at 16:53

Has anyone successfully rendered jqPlot charts as images server-side (e.g. with node.js)?

2 Answers2