Earlier this year I took a look at jQuery and Javascript charting solutions. Whilst they’re great, they lack a lot of the polish that Flash solutions can give you. This time round, I’m taking a look at some Flash solutions, what’s good, and what’s not so good.

Fusion Charts

Fusion Charts is also a very charting application. Unfortunately, it’s not free if you don’t want Fusion to be advertised on each chart – but some of the animations it uses to create the graphs are pretty sweet. I especially love going through the demo pages.

Fusion Charts starts at $69 upto the hefty $1999 for an Enterprise license.

Update: Fusion Charts have since launched with a free version here: http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/

Open Flash Chart

Open Flash Chart, and now version 2 is the most common flash chart implementation you will find all over the web (probably due to the fact its “open” and free ). The developer has got everything covered, including various takes on the common charts such as bar and line charts. In addition to this, the developer also supports a number of server side libraries, including Ruby, Java, .Net and PHP -  which makes implementation pretty darn easy!

XML/SWF Charts

Next up is the very sexy XML/SWF Charts. Just check out the way this these charts load in – Pretty amazing stuff.

XML/SWF Charts are as you expect from the name, charts that draw through SWF based on XML data – therefore you can use them with pretty much any programming language as long as you can produce some XML for the SWF to use. This is up there with the best of them!

AnyChart

AnyChart is unfortunately another pay for product, however so it should be. The amount of options that you have and the flexibility is huge! Just check out the above for a taste of what they can do – if you’re looking for a serious implementation, and want to spend some $$$ – AnyChart is definitely the first place to go!

amCharts

amCharts is another pay for charting application. They’ve got some good ideas – not far off though from other free versions. They’ve definitely got a corporate angle on things, with existing clients such as Sony, Motorola, Merril Lynch and Procter and Gamble to name a few. They’re also leaning heavily towards the financial aspects of charting (stocks etc), however there is no reason why their charting mechanism cannot be used in any scenario.

Swiff Chart

Swiff Chart has a great looking website. I was instantly hit with the Apple-like branding, and had high hopes for some equally branded charts. What I got wasn’t exactly that unfortunately. The application isn’t far off most others, but their examples (which I am sure can be customised) were very odd looking – garish colours, horrible layouts. Not my cup of tea anyway…

Google Visualization API

My final example is the Google Visualization API. We’re currently playing around with this at Sony and so far it’s been pretty good to us. One of the key things I like about it is the timeline functionality. You can basically view over time growth and drops within your chart. It also gives the end user the ability to manipulate the chart themselves which most others don’t go anywhere near.

Data again is driven by XML, so implementations are extremely easy and flexible. I can’t go into how we’re using it, but suffice to say we’ve been able to do some pretty cool things with it so far.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 and is filed under Development, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.