Open Flash Charts
I was browsing WebAppers the other night to see what I’ve been missing in the wonderful ‘Web 2.0′ world (I really hate that term) when I stumbled upon Open Flash Charts. I just had to check this thing out. There’s another Flash based charting software I’ve been using for a side project of mine. It’s actually fairly cheap at $50 per domain. But I figure I’d give this Open Flash Charts thing a try and see if it’s a good replacement. One of the features I’m in need of is ‘live’ data– where the charts update on the fly at some variable interval without a full page reload. Obviously so you can see ‘live’ data as your database tables are being populated. Open Flash Charts has just the thing using Javascript/AJAX. The developer makes note that the AJAX API is experimental and may change, but for now I have something that works. So here’s what I came up with. Click here for a demo
You should be able to download the OFC project and be able to throw this together in a matter of minutes. It was actually a lot easier than I had original thought. A more elegant way of making this work would be to use Prototype or MooTools or any of the other Javascript frameworks as they have Periodical Executers of some sort.