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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Design the page that hosts the chart and provide create the appropriate data structure which will feed the chart with data.
4. learn to use a very interesting framework of representing data as charts – Google Visualisations

Next steps:

1. Offer the posibility to choose among all 30 currencies for which the BNR provides exchange rates.
2. implement AJAX for smooth behavior of refreshing the page while user chooses a different currency.

Enjoy!