Any question answered...

FAO: Web Devs

I have been asked to produce a web dashboard for a bespoke IT system, to show summaries in table and graph view etc.

I used to know HTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL (made a website part of my dissertation years ago) and am re-learning at the moment. I think this is out of my depth. Are there any easy solutions/frameworks that exist for this sort of thing or should I kindly tell them this is out of my depth?

If the metrics are known at design time, this becomes a lot easier, as you wouldn't have to work out how to make the queries configurable and make the display of them cope with that.

For a live-data dashboard (on my current day-job platform) I'd use

• D3.js for the rendering (haven't used it yet, but it seems better than jqPlot, which I have)
  
• Fetch the data from an ASMX (old-style) .Net WebService which contains
  
• LINQ-to-SQL to fetch stored data and generate appropriately structured data.
  
  
  

(The latter two chosen because I haven't worked with WCF WebServices and Entity Framework yet.)

Outside of this workplace, I'd still be temped to use a C#/.Net backend, because I haven't seen anything else that does what LINQ does and isn't LINQ. The ability to trace a calculated property in one layer right back to the database fields in VisualStudio and have it strongly-typed all the way is very empowering, and it fits how my brain navigates entity models better than plain old SQL.