I started working on a stock charting idea 6 or 8 months ago and I finally have something cool to show for it. And most importantly, I learned some stuff along the way.

This is a stock chart. Yeah that's right - it's the price of a stock plotted over time. What makes is special is that I fabricated the entire thing out of thin air. Well, not exactly. I did have a little help from libpng.

What you see here is an image that is completely generated on the fly by my web server whenever this page is loaded. The charting engine is written in C++ and is driven by a PHP script whenever a chart request is made. The script invokes the chart engine which renders the image, and then passes it straight back to your web browser. To make it fast, I maintain a database of historical stock price information for over 6000 securities on the NYSE, Nasdaq, and American Stock Exchanges.

Eager for more stock charts? Check out my demo page.