Hypatia: Perl glue between DBI and data visualization modules

Hypatia is a new data visualization API written in Perl. It takes advantage of several Modern Perl features, including Moose and Dist::Zilla (in fact, as of the time of this writing, the only code committed is for a Dist::Zilla build).

For reporting and analysis of data, it's often useful to have charts and graphs of various kinds: line graphs, bar charts, histograms, etc. Of course, CPAN has modules for data visualization--in fact, there are quite a few of them, each with different features and wildly different syntaxes. The aim of Hypatia is to provide a layer between DBI and these data visualization modules, so that one can get a basic, "no-frills" chart with as little knowledge of the syntax of the particular data visualization package as possible.

So, for example, to get a line graph in Chart::Clicker, one could do this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Hypatia;

my $hypatia=Hypatia->new({
    back_end=>"Chart::Clicker",
    graph_type=>"Line",
    dbi=>{
    dsn=>"dbi:MySQL:dbname=database;host=localhost",
    username=>"jdoe",
    password=>"sooperseekrit",
    query=>"select DATE(time_of_sale) as date
    ,sum(revenue) as daily_revenue
    from widget_sales
    group by DATE(time_of_sale)"
    },
    columns=>{"x"=>"date","y"=>"daily_revenue"}
});

#grabs data from the query and puts it into a Chart::Clicker line graph
my $cc=$hypatia->chart;

#Since $cc is a Chart::Clicker object, 
#we can now do whatever we want to it.

$cc->title->text("Total Daily Revenue for Widget Sales");
$cc->write_output("daily_revenue.png");

At the moment there is only limited support for part of Chart::Clicker, but this will expand to include support for:

• GraphViz2
• R (via Statistics::R).
• GD::Graph (including 3D support with GD::Graph3D).
• And many more!