Jun/093
AnyChart Review
Recently, our client wanted to include a funnel chart in the next phase of the project I’m currently working on, but Flash Charting does not include this capability. As we looked around for solutions, we were pointed in the direction of AnyCharts. In this blog post I’m going to talk about the AnyChart plugin tool that my team used recently, specifically the good, the bad, and what I would like to see as a Flex user. For this specific post, I will not be providing any code samples, just two-bit opinions. If anyone has any requests for future AnyChart posts, please let me know.
As you look at the AnyChart website what you’ll notice is that the charts look really polished right out of the box. I am in no way a graphic designer so components that looks good out of the box, usually gets my attention first, because look and feel is the most difficult aspect of Flex for me.
AnyChart allows you to download their product in a few different formats, but I’m just going to focus on the SWC available for Flex, which is available here. The AnyChart SWC contains precisely one visual component that you can incorporate into your application, that being: AnyChartFlex. Within the AnyChartFlex Component, there are two fields that you can set to control all of the charting options: anychartXML and anychartXMLFile.
As I alluded to earlier, the AnyChart presentation is very crisp and polished without any styling, whereas Flex is not. To give you an idea of the difference in the polish, I’ve included a simple chart with no styling applied to it using the Flex charting packages.
This is the same type of chart rendered using AnyChart without any styles.
As I said, right out of the box, it looks really nice… if it has enough space. But this is where Anycharts started to give us trouble. When you start trying to embed the chart within an application where space is a premium, AnyCharts needs a tremendous amount of massaging to look good. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, our application was set up similar to this, 2 rows of charts with 2 charts in each row.
Whereas, Flex Charting has no problem scaling down to a smaller size.
As you can see, all of the items that looked really slick right out of the box, are now all jumbled up. It takes a while to do, but you can change numerous settings on the XML you pass into the component and get something that fits into the confined space and still looks nice.
One of the things I think the creators of AnyChart could do to help with the problem is to make AnyChartFlex a utility class instead of a visual component and create at least two different visual components.
A) AnyChartCanvas – this would essentially be exactly what they have today, it would have the legend, title, etc
B) AnyChart – this would be just the chart, no legend, no title, no extra padding at all
One other thing I would request is
C) AnyChartLegend – self explanatory
Overall, the tool is really nice for Flex developers who aren’t great with look and feel, but I see tremendous growth opportunities for it.
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11:24 am on July 10th, 2009
Have you come across any other problem with AnyChart? They’ve been around for at least 5 or so years in the flash world, but I really don’t hear much about them, positive or negative.
1:24 pm on August 19th, 2009
Tom, I apologize for my not responding earlier. The biggest issues we had were mainly with the spacing. Otherwise it ran pretty well.
9:40 pm on June 22nd, 2010
Any news on your assessment of Anycharts? I’m looking at using it for some very flexible charting of a 4 pod presentation of related metrics. Resizing, printing and copy image to powerpoint are important.