Spent a few hours today trying to figure out the 'graph' views for Cinemon. Problem is, the graphs need to be active, that is, moderately interactive, with all sorts of hyperlinks from within them. Graphing packages are focused more on static graphs, so they don't seem to allow for specifying interactive features of the graph (basically SVG properties).

So, I'm faced with writing layout code that can take an abstract data specification and perform the layout calculations, while letting me specify how each data-point/bar/block is rendered. That seems like it should be something stored in a library somewhere that can be reused with whatever back-end is involved.

I'm pretty sure that I could get matplotlib to do the work, it's just that AFAICS it would be more work to learn matplotlib sufficiently to do such a customisation (and then every installation requires the rather-hard-to-build-on-unix matplotlib) than to just hard-code the few graphs I need directly in SVG. The fact that matplotlib doesn't seem to have e.g. histogram graphs by default makes me even warier about investing the time on it.

Just kvetching about reinventing another wheel, you can safely ignore this post...