Adobe Flex 2 Case Study And The Power Flex 2 Charting

However, I did take notice of one particular aspect of this case study's implementation that I think gets glossed over in the Flex 2 vs. AJAX decision-making process: visualizing your data. (And let's be honest for a second: while I know you'll hear many who say that you can use both Flash and AJAX together, including the Adobe brass, that doesn't seem to be happening in most applications that I've seen (with perhaps a smattering of notable exceptions); most are in one camp or the other.)

While developers will likely note that the cross-platform features of the Flex 2 platform are its biggest strength, I respectfully disagree. That's an incredible convenience, but it's not why I'm going to use it in my work. See, I'm of the school of thought that I need to present my users with the best experience possible based on the presented requirements. Humans are, by nature, visual beings. If presented with a table of data or a chart that presents that same data, a user is going to more quickly and efficiently draw his or her conclusion from the chart virtually every time. It's how our brains work. I think of the old cliche that "a picture is worth a thousand words." That may sound trite, but cliches become cliches because they're true. To that end, the most differentiating feature of the Flex 2 platform, to me, is the charting suite. The Flex 2 charting components allow users to visualize their data in ways that previously required third-party vendors and lots of supplemental code to interact with it. Andrew Tahvildary, vice president of development and Primavera Services (the subject of this case study) notes that, with Flex 2's charting components, "...we were able to use a combination of charts and data grids to provide multidimensional views over a large set of analytical data." I just don't know of many AJAX libraries that come out-of-the-box with this capability, and at Flex 2's price point.

Have you seen the Adobe Flex 2 Component Explorer yet (Adobe Flash Player 9 required)? There are 16 default chart types, and all of them are extensible so that you can customize a chart to your needs. Want to see what a real-world implementation of the charting components might look like? Have a look at the Dashboard example (Adobe Flash Player 9 required) and watch how selecting data slices in one part of the application affects the charts in the other areas of the application without pages refreshes or xmlHTTP requests. The power to visualize data sets, whether simple or complex, is a mostly overlooked feature when building applications, and the Adobe Flex 2 charting suite provides you with the ability to make your users much more productive at minimal development cost.

Have a look!