In this global crisis, nothing is more useful than a good chart to watch your money as investment. That’s why I created a special page which collects freely available exchange rates from BNR (National Romanian Bank) and presents them in a graphical form. This way, the viewers of my website will always be on the edge with exchange rates, as soon as BNR posts them (usually around 13:00 GMT+2).
The main challenges were:
- Building a php script to parse XML, inserting the exchange rates into database. The lack of experience and debugging tools made a huge difference in development time. But all is working now.
- Creating a php script that will daily update the exchange rates, so the users will have the fresh rates at their disposal as soon as possible.
- Design the page that hosts the chart and provide create the appropriate data structure which will feed the chart with data.
- learn to use a very interesting framework of representing data as charts – Google Visualisations
Next steps:
- Offer the posibility to choose among all 30 currencies for which the BNR provides exchange rates.
- implement AJAX for smooth behavior of refreshing the page while user chooses a different currency.
Enjoy!
