Flex Question

[Christopher Watkins]

Hi All,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask a question relating to
Flex, but I figured I'd start here. Please feel free to redirect me if
appropriate.

I'm considering using Flex for some of my app needs. The most
immediate need is for charting. I'm using an older Flash based
component that isn't very extensible.

However, I need error bars on my bar charts. I don't think Flex offers
this out of the box, and this is highly annoying if this is the case.
Are these charting components extensible -i.e., would it be pretty
trivial to create a new class of bar chart that supports error bars?

Either that, or any other ideas?

Thanks!
Chris
Chris Watkins
Lead Developer
Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas

[Kerr, Donald (JSC-DA8)[BAS]]

Quite extensible...best I've seen is Ely's examples on his blog...
http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/about/

I don't know if he has an error bar example, but he does show how to
take charts to higher level.

Don Kerr

[dkerr]

Chris, another good resource is Flexcoders
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/

Don

----- Original Message Follows -----
From: "Kerr, Donald (JSC-DA8)[BAS]" <Donald...@nasa.gov>
To: <hou...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [houcfug] Re: Flex Question
Date: Tue, 6 May 2008 17:15:39 -0500

[Force]

Chris,

You can also try this group. It's geared more towards the
development of custom components.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcomponents/

Mark

[John Bliss]

If anyone's looking for an alternative to cfchart that might do more
than cfchart out-of-box, this looks pretty interesting:

http://www.corda.com/popchart-graph-styles.php

(Sorry if everyone already knows about this...it's new to me :-)

On May 6, 4:59 pm, Christopher Watkins <cwatk...@bcm.tmc.edu> wrote:

[Chris Watkins]

Hi All,

Thanks for the tips, everyone. My current charting component uses a modified older version of FusionCharts, but I'll be danged if I can find the source of the swf's, and I don't have immediate access to any Flash developers. I'm very interested in using Flex, because it has so much more than charts and is free (for me, at least - research academia).

On a few side notes: after hearing about it for so long, I've been playing with Groovy/Grails over the last week and am really impressed so far. My other developers are Java guys, so I've been trying to leverage their skills by setting tasks up for heterogeneous development and exposing various components as services. For grins, I set up an autocomplete widget from YUI and set it against a typical servlet and then redid it with Groovy/Grails. Cake, particularly XML/JSON rendering in the latter. For anyone who wants to learn more or actually just enjoys writing code, I recommend playing around with it - grails.codehaus.org, and there is a decent tutorial here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-grails01158/ . Be advised that the fourth one in the series is a bit off, but if you do the first three, you'll have no problems going on your own, and this will take less than a day.

Back OT, I have a lesson learned from J2EE/CF integration. Maybe everyone knows this and I'm late to the party, but deploying a J2EE app inside a "standard" ColdFusion deployment is doable, but I don't recommend it. We did this as an earlier attempt to get more developers working on my project, and while it works, we were quite hampered by JRun's lack of support for newer Java (we're running MX 6.1), and it's made quite a mess of things like the web.xml file and other parts of the directory structure that I'd rather have left untouched by ColdFusion. I'm in the process of investigating upgrading to CF8 in order to deploy the whole app to Oracle Application Server (which is itself a significant task), and migrating all of the changes wrought by this approach is daunting. Just an FYI.

Thanks again, all.

Chris