After having good success experimenting with Flot, an open Javascript chart-plotting script based on JQuery, I've decided that it's officially "the one" for the Bailey project. The Flot homepage is here: http://code.google.com/p/flot/

I chose Flot for three main reasons over Simile's Timeplot and Google's Visualization API:

• It does what this project needs more or less out of the box
• JSON data formatting is a snap
• It's by far the easiest to use of the three tools, especially for anyone with JQuery experience (but that's by no means necessary)

I've already been working to integrate Flot for the past week or so, and am progressing at a good rate. I've written the bare-bones search form and the bare-bones visualization page; the next step is to allow the results for one to be exported to the other. I don't foresee any problems with the integration and am looking forward to seeing the tools working together soon. I'd like to design a single page that incorporates both views (search form + visualization) and uses AJAX to pass the data around, perhaps using tabs to separate the two. That way I can avoid having to constantly POST data.