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What Are Sparklines?

Sparklines are "intense, simple, wordlike graphics" so named by Edward Tufte. In lieu of a more detailed introduction, Professor Tufte's site has an early release of a chapter on sparklines.

Examples

Back in the dot-com heyday, you might remember that Cisco, EMC, Sun, and Oracle were nicknamed "the four horsemen of the Internet". You might now say: "companies that ride together, slide together." Large 10-year charts of these four stocks.

  
 5-YearCloseHighLow
Cisco19.5580.068.60
EMC13.05101.053.83
Sun5.0964.322.42
Oracle13.0143.317.32

I'm a Yankees fan, having grown up in New York. Unless you abhor baseball or were living under a rock in October 2004, you may remember the Yakees had some trouble in the postseason . The Red Sox responded to a bad start to win the ALCS and World Series in 8 straight wins.

Yankees fan or Red Sox fan, Republican or Democrat, the growing US deficit is a grave concern in the coming years. A strong economy helped push down the deficit during the Clinton presidency. After President Bush's first term and a costly war on terror, the picture is not so rosy. OMB data shows the ebb and flow of the deficit from 1983 - 2003.

Mission

We aim to increase the adoption of sparklines on the web by providing a high-quality PHP sparkline library with the following properties:

  • Flexible - While Sparkline is not a general-purpose graphing library, we do provide a wide range of options how your graphs are rendered. Version 0.1 supports line and bar modes, which allow for simple line, filled line, bar, and whisker graphs.
  • Elegant - It's important that sparklines are visually appealing, especially in the restricted visual environment of the web. Web sparklines should approach as closely as possible the aesthetic of printed sparklines.
  • Free - Sparkline is completely free to use on your personal website, company home page, or to include in your commercial product. Sparkline is distributed under the BSD license.

News

  • 10 November 2007 - Version 0.3 "South Hayward" is under development. More news to follow.
  • 3 June 2005 - I've opened a sparkline wiki at Wikispaces for discussion and documentation of this library. Please join us to help share knowledge of the library and experiences with sparklines in the wild.
  • 2 June 2005 - Version 0.2 "Union City" has been tagged in CVS and released on SourceForge. This version addresses several bugs found in version 0.1. Notably, small data sets rendered using line mode are fixed. This version has undergone substantially more real-world testing and can now be considered beta quality.
  • 8 November 2004 - Version 0.1 "Fremont" has been tagged in CVS and released on SourceForge. This version is alpha quality and likely contains bugs, oversights, and design flaws. All of the images on this page were rendered with this version based on the files in the 'samples' directory.
  • 6 November 2004 - Sparkline.org and the SourceForge project are public. We anticipate an 0.1 code release in the coming days.

Contribute

We're always looking for help making Sparkline complete and bug-free. All of our development is on SourceForge; we always welcome bug reports and feature requests in the trackers. You can also browse CVS to see the latest code. Patches in the spirit of our project are always welcome.

Like what we're doing?

You can help the Sparkline project in a number of ways even if you aren't fluent in PHP. Link to our site, tell your friends, use sparklines on your website and in your work. Help build our documentation and body of interesting examples at our wiki. Rate our project on Freshmeat.net, Hotscripts.com or by sending us links to sparklines in the wild for inclusion in our list of links.