I've been looking at graphing modules and tools (both Free and commercial) and have not found anything that really looks nice.

I mean nice. Like Dundas Charts for .NET ($700 - $4,000 USD).

In my opinion the best Perl graphing software I have come across is Perl Chart Director ($59 - $99) from Advanced Software Engineering.

While the Perl Chart Director looks a lot nicer (IMHO) than GD, it doesn't come anywhere close to Dundas.

We're not only talking about the visual appeal of the graphs generated by the software - I'm impressed by the simple API the Perl Chart Director has - very much along the lines of GD. Not exactly the same, but you basically pass it a list of data and a list of labels to generate graphs.

I'm shocked that something written on a platform that is consistently blasted and booed by the open-source community could have all these Features -- way more than anything else I have seen. Why don't we have something like this? I would do what I could to contribute, but this is certainly more than a one-person-project. This would have to be the the result of concerted effort of several expert programmers.

I figure some kind of OpenGL-to-raster conversion could help take things from 3D objects to the 2D world of images. Image::Magick, GD or Imager could handle stitching the resulting images together. New functionality could be borne from what already exists.

So, before I go and start up a new project on Sourceforge or whatever, I have to ask: Did I miss something, or are we lacking Really Nice Graphs?

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