Let’s face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday. Today, I show how to use a combination of PHP for the back end and Adobe Flex for the front end that will put interactive 3D within your grasp. Right now. Today. Let’s dig in.

Drupal is a fantastically well featured, and free, content management system written in PHP. No wonder so many companies are using it internally or externally as one of their business applications. But often Drupal alone is not enough. It needs to be integrated or extended to match the needs of the organization. One way to extend it is on the front-end through something like an Ajax or Flex based widget.