Thanks, I will look into it.:)

You might want to use 127.0.0.1 for the client ip address if testing on a single local machine. The 192.168.0.9 address was just for testing on my local network.

#my $machine_addr = '192.168.0.9';
my $machine_addr = '127.0.0.1';
[download]

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. ..... an animated JAPH

fortunately the program you have to extend is in Perl ;=)

You can try GD::Graph and additionally you can take a look to doughnut charts with gd:graph where marto points to a useful article.

See also this extract

For the interactive part.. I suppose you need some web interface to achieve interactivity, or a GUI like a Tk program.

L*

Thanks. I have looked into GD::Graph, but as I have used it to get output you generate an image from it. Now, I will be needing to regenerate this imagefile at least 10 times per second and I am in doubt as to whether perl can generate images at that rate. Also the user should be able to watch the image as the graph is drawn. There are a number of javascript libraries for this (most notably maybe Google::Charts) but alas the users will have no access to the internet. There are other javascript opitons as well which abandoned for reasons I don't recall at the moment :).

I don't think ten images per second is unreasonable. Of course, it depends on the amount of CPU you can dedicate to it, the complexity of the images, and how efficiently your code is written, but this article talks about GD generating an image in 0.003110 seconds and some digging in the Wayback Machine indicates that those numbers are from over ten years ago; on a modern CPU it should be faster. (The article was a test of the PHP bindings for LibGD, but it's the same underlying C library, so I don't see any reason why the Perl bindings would be significantly slower.)

toby döt ink

You *could* use Gnuplot which runs on Windows and then drive it with a Perl script using Chart::Gnuplot or something like GRIPPS.

While not strictly within your requirements, you could one of the many HTML/Javascript based plotting libraries and feed it pseudo-realtime data via websockets. This demo does it, except without the websockets part.

Or you could code your own webbased solution with HTML5 Canvas and websockets, for which it is also very easy to feed back user interactrion to your backend. While not a graph, a demo of the technology is here on my blog, and a description about interprocess messaging with Net::Clacks to feed data between the webserver and the backend is here: Interprocess messaging with Net::Clacks

Of course, this is only the way i would have solve, or rather have solved it in the past. And yes, this post is a shameless plug for my very own Net::Clacks ;-)