Programmatically generating graphs and charts using SVG requires a deep understanding of the SVG specification and the various SVG primitives, as well as a fair amount of time for research, experimentation and debugging. Or, in other words, that's your entire weekend shot! Fortunately, help is at hand. There are a number of open-source PHP libraries that support SVG chart generation, and using them can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in adding this feature to a Web application.

He shows how to create simple images like bar, line and pie charts as well as adding in other things like a legend, custom titles and a sample where the user can define the sizes of a pie chart via some form input fields. Screenshots are included for all code examples to give you a better idea of the end result.

While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.

My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal

He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.