[Please Vote] Bring back FLASH Charts as a fallback option!
[Please Vote] Bring back FLASH Charts as a fallback option!
First of all, I would like to say that I am really excited about canvas/svg drawing and the possibility to implement charting libraries using it. I do believe that this technology is absolutely right for the future, it will demonstrate astonishing capabilities once WebGL and web workers are streamlined and widely supported.
However, over the past year, I’ve used the charting library provided by ExtJS 4.x extensively and realized that this technology at its current state cannot satisfy the needs of a serious charting application, nor do I foresee it improving fast enough to be able to match the functionality/performance required now.
Therefore, I would like to discuss the possibility of bringing back flash charts as a fallback option for this transition period.
The rationale of this request is (and why svg/canvas charts are not enough):
Charts are drawn by JavaScript, the more charts you have and the more complex they are, the more single-threaded JavaScript cpu cycles you are going to lose while drawing them. As a result, other elements have to wait -> unresponsive and sluggish application. Web workers will probably fix this, but how far away are we?
Canvas is a part of DOM, the more charts you have and the more complex they are, the larger and slower your DOM becomes -> unresponsive and sluggish application.
All kinds of compatibility issues with older browsers and even new ones (recent Chrome 18 update). It looks like there is more to follow.
Limited ability to animate/prettify due to the aforementioned reasons. The result is: my charts don’t look better than yours, and we all know how sales are usually made!
Again, these limitations do not apply to some toy charts where you want to show how many bananas someone sold this year and what would next year look like, but rather when you want to display 10 line charts with 10 series consisting of 1000 data points, or couple of stacked bar charts with 150 series each while having some other complex layouts on the same page/other tabs.
Please +1 if you would like to see flash charts as a fallback option.
Also if you have use cases exposing svg/canvas inability to deliver, please add here!
Thank you
Thank you for your input and I will forward this to development. In working with complex financial charts over the years, I understand the need for advanced charting. Flash support is always a cause for debate
I am really not trying to start a debate here as I understand the benefits of canvas/svg drawing and drawbacks of flash. But at this point there is no usable solution for serious charting in ExtJS, so I think flash still has life here as a temporary solution for a next year or two!
I have not heard anything lately. I am flying out to CA next week. I plan talk with the dev team about our plans in regards to charting. Sencha Touch just received a big update to charting, hopefully Ext is not far behind.
Please let me know once you talk to them. Also if you could ask about their thoughts regarding feasibility of writing an extension. I am thinking to do that, but as you are probably aware this is quite an undertaking, and I wanted to hear alternate opinions before doing that.
If I understand correctly, the most recent Sencha Touch Charts have greatly improved performance over ExtJS charts, but there seems to be no timeline for merging those improvements into ExtJS.
Is it possible to use Sencha Touch Charts within an ExtJS application? Could we feasibly improve our (non-mobile web) application's charting performance by just upgrading our license and using the Sencha Touch Charts classes instead?
This is a very big problem for us, and we (like many others I can see) are considering using a different library because of it.
I had the same issue. Ext JS charts are awesome, but can't handle large datasets.
I've converted my charts to use Google Charts. They are incredibly fast.
I barely had to modify my application at all. For the data, you can use the same store/model you've been using. Then you just feed that data to the Google Charts API.
It works incredibly well and fast. I can now render a chart with 16 series of 1400 to 2000 data points EACH in under 750ms.
It's great to know that switching to Google Charts can be so easy, runs far faster and still can look pretty good. We selected ExtJS primarily because of the nice-looking charts, but have been extremely disappointed with performance. We even have very small data sets (a few dozen points at most), but we use the charts in a dashboard that updates frequently. Even on an 8-core Mac Pro ExtJS Charts makes the interface sluggish, and it's barely usable at all on most laptops, etc.
[Please Vote] Bring back FLASH Charts as a fallback option!
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