In this post I’ll present a way to send javascript functions over JSON from a php server (but it should work on other platforms too). Since PHP version 5.20 PHP includes the functions json_encode() and json_decode(). These functions encode values into JSON formatting and decode JSON formatted strings into associative arrays. The json_encode() function is not able to encode a value into a (javascript) function. This is a common issue when configuring graphs from Flotr (my Javascript plotting library) with JSON data. Here are my findings.

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I added an example to the Flotr example section. This example shows how to use requested JSON data to draw a graph. Go to the example section or take a look at the example directly. To learn more about handling JSON with Prototype, read Introduction to JSON

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I’m proud to announce Flotr 0.1.0 alpha, a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Javascript Framework (version 1.6.0.2 at the moment). This new (22kb) piece of javascript enables you to draw appealing graphs in most modern browsers. It replaces my older (and deprecated) plotting library Plotr. This time I took some more time to write documentation and examples, see the result on the Flotr project page.

Flotr is actually a rewrite of Flot (by Ole Laursen), a javascript plotting engine for jQuery. I (partially) rewrote it to use Prototype and added some new features like event hooks and mouse tracking.

A graph generated by Flotr

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