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Article:
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SVG: Where Are We Now?
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| Subject: |
SVG Charts (Agileblox Vs. Flash) |
| Date: |
2003-06-15 18:56:41 |
| From: |
Kate Novac |
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Cost: Agileblox cost US$1,350 verses just US$99 for FusionCharts.
Agileblox needs ASV3 (Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0). However, if you call Adobe for any help, they tell you that it is not a supported product. Also, they refuse to comment about any future plans for ASV, which led many to speculate that ASV would be discontinued. It is installed on about 7% of the computers. On the other hand FusionCharts needs Macromedia’s Flash-player, which is installed on well over 99% computers.
If you try the products, you would notice FusionCharts are far simpler than Agileblox. Agileblox requires custom-installations and supports only limited server-platforms. FusionCharts doesn’t require any installation and runs on all web-server platforms. If you know how to create XML-files on your favorite platform, creating Charts using FusionCharts is a snap. To further simplify this task FusionCharts provide sample XML-files as templates. All you need to do is just update the data and style in the sample template. No complicated Java API to learn.
Both support rich set of charts and features. However, FusionCharts has large installed base of customers, their valuable inputs help them to learn and improve the product. This led them to implement popular charts (Ex: Bar-and-line combo-chart etc.) and features (Ex: TrendLine, TrendZones etc.), which are not supported by Agileblox. It has been 18 months since the release of Agileblox 1.0 and still at version 1.0. It is yet to announce any plans for future upgrades. During the same period FusionCharts released many upgrades with many additional useful features based on feedbacks from large installed base of customers.
P.S: Would Elansoft care to comment on the fraud-charges at: http://www.manero.org/weblog/archives/000083.html ?
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- SVG Chart (Elansoft Agileblox Vs. Flash)
2004-02-05 23:42:32 Mike Hill
[Reply]
Elansoft care to answer the FRAUD charges at:
http://www.manero.org/weblog/archives/000083.html
The caption on the main page of the Elansoft’s web site supports using Flash based FusionCharts and makes strong case against using Agileblox. Thanks for the following caption!
The Caption Reads: There is a need for components, which could use combined prowess of the existing technologies, to rendering the data dynamically on to the web, in independent across all Operating systems, programming platforms and rendering browsers.
Does Agileblox 2.0 support web technologies such as, Xforms, X3D, SMIL, Flash, Webservices, HTML, DHTML, XST, XSLT etc.? Also, web technologies such as Flash and Applets support very powerful application features such as live Socket connection with the server, for real-time updates.
The Agileblox uses only a subset of the SVG (Ex: it does not use latest powerful component features of the SVG, such as RCC) and does not run on any other viewers (Ex: BitFlash., Mozilla-nativeSVG, Corel or Batik). Does it? Does it have any clue about Web services?
This caption says, look for a product that runs on all browsers and uses all the web technologies. We should wait until Agileblox runs on all the browsers and supports all the technologies. Elansoft should announce the release date for such Agileblox. It may be long wait, science SVG is installed on only 9% of the computers and according to Adobe even that viewer is not yet supported.
Meanwhile better explore cheap alternatives such as Flash based FusionCharts, which runs on all Operating systems, programming platforms (Ex: J2EE, .NET/ASP & CGI etc.) and installed on over 99% of the browsers. Doesn’t it make sense?
- SVG Chart (Elansoft's Agileblox and XAML)
2003-10-30 19:27:12 Mike Bee
[Reply]
One major difference between SVG and Avalon/XAML is, SVG is interpreted while executables for the Avalon/XAML is compiled binary. SVG viewer interprets SVG documents; while, Avalon/XAML document must be compiled in advance to create an exe file to run.
Avalon/XAML is next generation vector-graphics technology announced by Microsoft and Adobe committed to support this technology in their products. This is a setback for Elansoft’s Agileblox to leverage future Avalon infrastructure and boon for FusionCharts.
Java-classes in Agileblox need run-time data in advance before generating SVG-chart or file. To create SVG-file for each chart, the Java classes use the run-time data at server to calculate various display-elements, such as size of bars in a bar-chart, or size of each slice of a pie-chart etc.
On the other hand, FusionCharts use external XML-data at client to create the Flash-chart. The FusionCharts are akin to binary-exe files, and they won’t change for each different chart. Only file that changes between two different charts is the external XML-data file.
The server sends client, both static binary-swf file and dynamic XML-data created at run time. At the client, the binary-swf file reads the data and creates Flash-chart. This fits perfectly with Microsoft’s Avalon framework. Avalon platform needs compiled Avalon-EXE; which could be programmed to read external XML-data.
You could easily replace the binary-swf file with a compiled Avalon-EXE file. Since, XAML is super set of SWF and far more powerful, the FusionCharts could easily be translated from SWF files to XAML files and compile the XAML-files to create binary-EXE files. Also XAML won’t support some SVG-features, such as CSS and JavaScript etc.
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