By barneyb on November 10, 2011
Before you click over this because you know me as a Flash hater, give me two seconds. That's not what this post is about. It's about a larger issue. It's about how awesome it is to be a web developer these days.
Ten years ago, being a web developer sucked. Deployment was easy (rsync to production [...]
Posted in ajax, development, flex, javascript, tools
By barneyb on October 22, 2008
The current state of web applications is a fragmented mess. HTML is still the standard approach, but dynamic data loading with Ajax and application embedding with Flash are both incredibly popular, particularly for data-heavy applications.
HTML is great because it's easy to build and well understood by user agents, but you lack drawing capabilities. SVG addressed [...]
Posted in ajax, flex, javascript, tools
By barneyb on October 20, 2008
I've released FlexChart 2.0 today. Binary download is available here: flexchart_2-0-r4392.zip. The demo app is still available, of course. Backwards compatibility is not quite 100%, as I'll explain below, but the non-compatibilities only affect certain classes of charts, and they're the complex ones. For simple stuff it should be drop-and-go.
There are no real outward changes [...]
Posted in flex, javascript, tools
By barneyb on October 9, 2008
I've made another minor enhancement to FlexChart, this time around grouped legends. Previously, if you mixed grouped series and ungrouped series (e.g. a stacked column chart with a line series overlaid), the legend would be all kinds of wonky for the line series. I've fixed that so it'll now render in a reasonable way.
As always, [...]
Posted in flex, tools
By barneyb on September 30, 2008
Been a long while since I've made any updates to FlexChart, and this is only a minor one, but it's potentially important. Since it's designed to be used in JavaScript applications, data tips and click events are all processed by JavaScript (not ActionScript). When I'd created the data tip callbacks, I'd neglected to considered the [...]
Posted in flex, javascript, tools
By barneyb on April 29, 2008
The past month or so has seen quite a few improvements and bug fixes to FlexChart, though I haven't blogged about any of them. Most notably, there was a weird NPE that manifested itself when loading a Pie chart via FlashVars. For some unknown reason, Flex/Flash didn't give any indication the error was occurring, it just silently [...]
Posted in development, flex, tools
By barneyb on January 18, 2008
Another update to FlexChart this evening, providing set and series colors (both fills and strokes), an option for including/excluding the legend when exporting a chart to PNG, and a few new examples showcasing the features (including some really ugly developer art).
With the coloring support, the 'Grouped Series' example makes a lot more visual sense, so [...]
Posted in flex, tools
By barneyb on January 17, 2008
Another batch of changes to FlexChart.
First is grouped series, which is hard to explain, but easy to understand. Go hit the demo and select "Grouped Series" from the dropdown. The chart layout has always been possible, but the legend just displayed a flat series list with no awareness of the groupings. To see the old [...]
Posted in flex, tools
By barneyb on January 14, 2008
Long time no blog… I've updated my FlexChart component slightly, as well as repackaged it for easier consumption. The new feature is the availability of a 'dataTipFunction' attribute on the root 'chart' element, which will be called to format data tips. It gets passed an object with various keys about the backing chart item. Since [...]
Posted in flex, tools
By barneyb on November 29, 2007
I've updated the FlexChart demo to include display of the descriptor XML that is loaded into the chart, as well as providing a way to edit the XML inline and load your modified XML into the chart client-side. In addition to being far easier to experiment with, it also showcases the the client-side redrawing of [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools