Flex provides a rich, sophisticated set of dynamic charts , but a license fee is required (via purchase of FlexBuilder Professional ) to use these Flex charts for most realistic production situations. There are several other charting options including Open Flash Chart , amCharts , Fusion Charts Free , Google Charts , and JFreeChart / Eastwood Charts . In this blog entry, I'll briefly look at using Google Charts and Eastwood Charts 1.1.0 with Flex. Because the Eastwood Chart Servlet implements the most of the APIs of Google Charts , my example will be able, in most cases, to call either charting provider based on user selection. There are some extensions in Eastwood beyond the Google Chart API and the Google Chart API has some features still not implemented in Eastwood, but most of the common functionality is commonly implemented in both charting providers. The concept behind Google Chart API (and hence applies to Eastwood Chart Servlet as well) involves providing data for chart generation to the chart provider via HTTP URL parameters and getting an image ( PNG ) as a response. While URLs constructed to request chart generation from Google Charts and Eastwood Charts are almost always the same (because Eastwood is implemented to the Google Charts API), there are differences between the two implementations of these APIs. Using Google Charts is really easy because no work needs to be done on the server-side. All the developer needs to ...
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