After playing with Open Flash Chart 2 trying to make interactive scatter plot, I've found severe glitches that popped up during prototyping. Library worked quite well for standard line and bar charts. But for my specific scatter chart I realized that:
I summed all problems and thought about potential extendability problems and tried to move to library based on HTML Canvas object. One of the simplest and most mature projects is Flot. It has all required features, including interaction. The only problem I found was rendering under IE using Excanvas emulation object. Standard stable Flot version doesn't work well under IE8. Charts were drawn although without data points. After checking project issues list, I've found that some problems where resolved by using newer JQuery and Excanvas library. I've tried to run Flot from trunk version, and my IE8 problems were solved. As a extra newer Flot version contains more interesting plugins like navigation. BTW maybe it's time to publish next Flot stable version in downloads section. The only disadvantage of that solution is forcing IE users to accept running Excanvas security policy.
- I have to use hacks to provide 0,0 origin based XY axes (OK I could just use standard left/bottom axes)
- there are problems with larger scale values (I didn't checked exactly but values in range to 10000 rendered OK, somewhere above it is some kind of limitation)
- problem with grid rendering for values in less than zero range
- OFC can't parse scientific notation values (data number formatting is a must)
- some minor problems that could be solved by chart tuning and hacking ranges etc.
- after playing with OFC stable version I've checked last trunk version that worked much better
I summed all problems and thought about potential extendability problems and tried to move to library based on HTML Canvas object. One of the simplest and most mature projects is Flot. It has all required features, including interaction. The only problem I found was rendering under IE using Excanvas emulation object. Standard stable Flot version doesn't work well under IE8. Charts were drawn although without data points. After checking project issues list, I've found that some problems where resolved by using newer JQuery and Excanvas library. I've tried to run Flot from trunk version, and my IE8 problems were solved. As a extra newer Flot version contains more interesting plugins like navigation. BTW maybe it's time to publish next Flot stable version in downloads section. The only disadvantage of that solution is forcing IE users to accept running Excanvas security policy.
IT Pro Life
