Demonstration of a dynamically generated figure served using the Bottle microframework.

bottle-matplotlib.py

"""
A simple example that generates a random figure and serves it using Bottle
"""

import numpy as np
import StringIO

from matplotlib.backends.backend_agg import FigureCanvasAgg as FigureCanvas
from matplotlib.figure import Figure

from bottle import Bottle, run, response

app = Bottle()


@app.route("/test")
def test():

    fig = Figure()
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
    ax.imshow(np.random.rand(100, 100), interpolation='nearest')
    canvas = FigureCanvas(fig)
    png_output = StringIO.StringIO()
    canvas.print_png(png_output)
    response.content_type = 'image/png'
    return png_output.getvalue()

run(app, host='localhost', port=8080)

How does the response object get used by the function?

The response function is handled by the bottle API. Would need to have a look at the app.route decorator for the details.

What if I want to incorporate the png into an HTML template?

Perhaps you could use flask:

https://gist.github.com/862153

Thanks @nfaggian, this is probably what I'm looking for.
@laserson: I have a very simple idea, I don't know if it will work, but it could be a good try:

@app.route("/test.png")
def test(): 
    fig = Figure()
    ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
    ax.imshow(np.random.rand(100, 100), interpolation='nearest')
    canvas = FigureCanvas(fig)
    png_output = StringIO.StringIO()
    canvas.print_png(png_output)
    response.content_type = 'image/png'
    return png_output.getvalue()

@app.route("/try_template")
def try_template(): 
    return '<h4>The template</h4><img src="/test.png" />';