NETWAYSGrapher V2: From Flash to Flot

This week we released NETWAYSGrapher V2 2.0.0 with a few significant changes. The most noticeable of all was our switch from Flash based graphs to Java script. Originally a great idea for fantastic, smooth looking charts, zoom interactivity, dynamic multi-graph layering and real-time graphing, we were sad to bid it farewell. But after many attempts to resolve client side browser problems such as burdened CPU performance and slow zoom functionality, we decided that for our Grapher, Flash was just a flop.

That’s when we began our search for suitable libraries. We came upon Google ChartTools, which was pretty impressive with its interactive charts – but its visualisation API was only available through URL request, which was too limiting for our needs.

Finally we stumbled across Flot – an open source, Java script plotting library for JQuery. Flot allows us to offer all the same functions we had with Flash – real-time graphing, multi-graph layering, mouse tracking, and zoom interactivity – all with far faster front end and CPU performance. Not to mention the fact that many new devices do not support Flash, relying on HTML instead – we managed to close yet another gap with Flot. Topped off with plugin extensibility, simple and flexible options, Flot was simply the upshot. Cheers to Ole Laursen and IOLA for the great little tool that saved the Grapher.