Blogs

Ryan Stewart pointed out that Yahoo has added charting to their framework:

YUI, one of the most popular Ajax frameworks, has implemented charting functionality using Flash. Using Flash for charting with Ajax isn’t a new concept.

I agree that this is great news for Adobe and the Flash platform. However, I think it’s a little ridiculous Adobe didn’t facilitate this with Flex Charting, FA Bridge and External Interface. It’s been almost 2 yrs since we did this, and it should have been a model for how Adobe should move forward supporting the Ajax community. Instead Adobe has this kick ass charting capability locked up in a component that costs a few hundred dollars and not getting much play. Especially when you see articles like this pitting Adobe against Ajax. Adobe has jumped into the Ajax game with Webkit in AIR, has tooling with JS Eclipse and Dreamweaver but just needs to go a little bit further to really dominate the RIA space. I’ve pondered before on what impact Flash and AIR can have as dominant runtimes, but but the lions share of web apps today are in the Ajax camp, so Adobe has to win there too. We’ll see what happens.