What technologies for graphing real-time data on a website?

[MrWhippy]

Fancy learning something new and have a few project ideas, several of which could involve needing to graph/chart numeric data to a Web page. I've very little knowledge of code or appropriate technologies for a task like this. Any suggestions for sensible ways I might go about it?

For info, I'm an ex software engineer, not coded for a few years, and my experience is split between embedded systems and high performance processing. I'm not afraid to learn new stuff but I've no idea where to start. I've next to no knowledge of databases or Web technologies.

I do know c, c++, java, python.
Let’s say I have a numeric data stream being generated on my server, what might be a sensible way of setting up a Web server to display it? Do I need to be sending the data to a database? Is this a job for javascript or something else?

This is all for personal interest, just a little project to blow away the cobwebs, no serious or commercial objectives.

Cheers for any pointers.

 

[MrWhippy]

Cheers. I guess it won't be very high data rate, one or two hz at most but could be much lower. Initially likely to be single time series data, numeric floating point, down the line it might be multiple streams. The data will be being generated by code running on the server, not written yet, might be a running executable or python script.

As I said I have a number of project ideas I fancy playing with, but several could require visualisation of time series data so I thought I'd better find out how to do that sort of thing.

So one project might be analogous to monitoring data from a weather station (temperature / humidity / barometric pressure etc). Interfacing to hardware to take measurements and data processing and analysis I'm capable of, but I've no experience of data visualisation methods.

Thinking ahead, further down the line I might want to be able to communicate back into my 'system' from the Web page - toggle switch / setting values etc. Does this influence the choice of methods? Cheers for any suggestions.

 

[MrWhippy]

Thanks for the heads up, that gives me somewhere to start. I'll get reading.