Context

A big part of my job consists of overviewing and administrating our nightly batches. I'm interested in creating a reporting tool where other (less techie) members of the team will be able to visualize the execution times and statistics of all our batches.

Problem

Every morning I recieve a CSV file containing statistics on the execution of the jobs. Here's the CSV header:

JobID; JobName; StartTime; EndTime; ExitStatus;

Parsing this with Python is extremely easy, and I was able to build a Model around the data fairly easily. I also store data daily in a DB in order to present periodical statistics.

Now I want to create a webapp that would visually display the execution times of a given day. Brace yourselves, here comes the ascii artist in me:

http://my.server.domain/20120119

08----09----10----11----00----01----02----03----04----05----06----07----08
|
|   ##>(job1)
|        #####>(job2)
|                                  ############> (job3)

In this case, we can see that:

* job1 executed from 8:30pm to 9pm.
* job2 executed from 9pm to 10:30pm.
* job3 executed from 00am to 3am.

Despite my obvious talent for Ascii goodness, I'm not sure it's very useful in a corporate context. I want to generate images (jpeg?png?gif?) representing the same.

Question

What are the existing tools/modules/libraries/APIs/frameworks would you suggest I use? Did you have any real life experience with something similar?

I prefer Python, but I'm flexible about languages. Here's the list of technologies my employer allows on his machines:

- Java (<= 1.6.x)
- Python (<= 2.7.x)
- Perl (<= 5.8.8)
- C++
- ksh or bash