PerlSearcher:

If you're asking these questions, then you don't know perl. If you're going to program the system yourself then learning and using perl would be a fine choice. Using code from CPAN will give you much of the capabilities you want.

But your question is still too open ended: what kinds of graphs do you want to draw? What data volumes are you interested in? Since you've provided so few constraints, nearly anything you're told could be a good answer, no matter if it's useful to you or not. Your project might be best implemented as a VBA script in Excel, a perl program, flash or just about anything depending on the particulars.

What's the prototype supposed to prove/demonstrate?

...roboticus