Flash Charts: Know Everything About Them

By Author: Antonio Bristow
Total Articles: 45

A flash chart is a chart which depicts a dynamic and a standard statistical chart like bar chart, pie chart, line chart, stacked percent chart etc.A Flash Charting tool is used to develop a flash chart.
Flash charts are incorporated in websites, web based products, desktop applications etc. for further use. For viewing a flash chart on a computer, Adobe Flash Player is required to be installed. Since most of the computers have Adobe Flash Player installed on them, flash charts become very accessible.

How does a flash chart work?
1) The user browser opens your website.
2) The browser downloads the web page containing the Open Flash Chart.
3) The Open Flash Chart downloads the required data files and presents the chart.

Flash charts optimize the data visualization experience with the help of its wide range of features. For e.g. built in fade in effect, built in printing capabilities, Full ActionscriptAPI, drill down feature etc. A drill down feature of flash charts helps in building mouse sensitive charts. Any additional data associated with each of the plots displayed on the chart can also be viewed with the help of the drill down feature of flash charts. Flash charts offer a number of aesthetic and interactive features such as animation, tooltips, dynamic updates etc. The dynamic update feature of flash charts makes it very much useful for stock market websites as it helps in showing the current values of stocks.

Types of flash charting tools:
1) SWF Generation Tool: it creates a SWF file (a flash movie) which depicts a dynamic, animated and interactive chart. A limitation of this tool is that they can be used to create only statistical charts where the data remains constant.
2) Data Driven Flash Charting Tools: widely incorporated in websites and they contain a number of SWF files that help in generating charts.

Benefits of flash charts
1) No flash domain knowledge required-you just need to upload the core SWF files to the server and then configure them with the help of XML data files.
2) No advanced programming skills required-you don't need any advanced programming skills to develop the charts. They can be generated very easily without the use of any technical knowledge.
3)Compliance with a number of scripting languages-flash charts are compatible with many scripting languages like NET,ASP,CF,ASP,Perl,etc.
4) Suitability for narrow bands- very small file size of the component makes it suitable for the narrow band connections also.

Author's bio: Antonio Bristow is a self-published author on Flash, PHP and other charts for web applications. In this article he has given us a brief insight into the highlights of flash charts. For more details, visit http://www.fusioncharts.com/livedemos.asp