Barney Boisvert releases FlexChart v2.0

Posted by Dan on Oct 21, 2008 @ 1:00 PM

Barney Boisvert released FlexChart 2.0 yesterday. This is a Flex-based charting tool that can be used to easily adding graphs to your ColdFusion projects. While ColdFusion does have a number of Charting tools integrated into the product, it seems every time I go to use them I run into limitation after limitation that prevents me from using them. So, if you're looking for alternative charting for ColdFusion, the you should check out the FlexChart demos.

Categories: HTML/ColdFusion, Flex/Flash

1 Comments

  • Barney's Gravatar
    Barney
    Dan,

    FlexChart happens to have a demo written in CFML, but it's really a pure JavaScript widget. The descriptor is vanilla XML, all interactivity is via JS, and it's designed to be SWFObject-loaded. Most of the places I use it happen to be CF driven, but it's jQuery and SWFObject to set everything up, and jQuery to AJAX in the XML from the server and stick it in the SWF. Works like a friggin' champ.

    The CF "integration" consists of an optional custom tag that writes the JS needed to load the SWF, and that's it. It doesn't provide any chart building functionality, only SWF loading. I.e. even if you use the custom tag, you still have to manually build your XML descriptor to pass to the tag. Even the demo app only uses CF to make dynamic XML packets requested by Prototype and loaded into the TEXTAREA. Then they're simply string-copied from the TEXTAREA into the SWF. To put that another way, the SWF never gets CFML-emitted XML, it only gets stuff copied from the TEXTAREA. Soon after the initial release I considered rewriting the demo app with pure HTML/JS/XML (no CFML), but never got around to it.

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