My group is working on a Flex/AS3 scientific web application that is data intensive. Luckily the only plots involved are line charts. However, each line chart may have multiple traces (up to 24), and each trace may contain up to 2000 points. The user will need to zoom in and out and interact with the data (e.g. data tips, etc.).
The response I’m getting from developers is that’s a lot of data to render in a plot in Flash. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, we can’t sample the data to reduce the size (this has already been done and nature of the data prevents further sampling).
Rendering speed is critical for this app. What kind of rendering speed should I expect the Flex 4 line chart component to provide for a given number of points (e.g. 1 second to render 1000 points?)
Are there products available that handle plotting large data sets better, which can be incorporated in Flex (I’ve seen FusionCharts and ZingCharts online but have no idea how they compare with Flex’s components)? Of those, which are easy to develop with while still providing a lot of flexibility in look and feel?
I have worked with large datasets in flex charts, and all I can say is : if your main criteria is the performance, you’ve chosen the wrong technology. Flex is nice to display small amounts of data, but as soon as you manipulate, say, data with more than 2000 rows and 10 columns, the built-in flex charts won’t do the trick (but DataGrid will). Furthermore, consider the lack of scrolling/zooming components and the fact that Flex charts are a bit old now. My guess is that the biggest problems with large amounts of data displayed in charts are the need of a high level of interactivity and the fact that the charts are not optimized.
There are several tricks to improve Flex charting componnts though : here.
I’ve not tried the other frameworks, but I’ve heard that AmCharts can give good performance…
In Javascript, I suggest you to take a quick look at DyGraphs.