Whenever a new product arrives on the scene the obvious question poses itself which is "What does this product do that the other's don't?" On that basis, given that Visiblox Charts is exactly such a new product, I thought I'd talk a little bit about that issue. However, it seemed to me it might be interesting to look beyond specific feature comparisons. Clearly there are feature differences between Visiblox Charts and our competitors and those are important, but they are fairly self-evident from the documentation on respective websites. Instead I'd like to talk a little bit about where Visiblox came from and why it was built because that gives quite a good picture of where our attention is focused and what we think Visiblox brings to the table.
Why are all the wheels out there square?
Some time ago, a client approached us and was interested in writing a financial application front end using WPF and exposing that on the web using Silverlight. They were interested in benefiting from the single technology stack for both platforms. We've been building charting solutions and components for years in all sorts of technologies (Java, Flex, JS/HTML, .NET ... take your pick) so we set about doing some research into existing Silverlight charting components as charting was going to be a key element of the application. Our findings did not fill us with confidence, none of the products we found and tried from the Silverlight Toolkit through to the various commercial offerings, were able to cope with anything close to the volume of data we needed and offer a level of performance we deemed even close to acceptable. The few products that did offer something approaching to decent performance used heavy data sampling to do so which is a lossy procedure and can result in the data "meaning" being skewed so we weren't too happy about that. Sampling, to my mind, is a last resort fall-back, not a first candidate.
That left us with the decision about where to go from there, so we thought we'd do a little proof of concept implementation of a chart in Silverlight that was explicitly built for performance and with that Visiblox took its first baby steps. From there we quickly realised that we had a blank canvas to work with and an opportunity to create a really high quality charting component. The rest, as they say, is history. Fast-forward past all the hard work that went into turning that first little demo into a fully-fledged, versatile and powerful charting component product and Visiblox Charts has arrived.
Have your cake and eat it too - The Visiblox Way
Knowing a bit about where Visiblox came from, let's get back to the original question, what makes Visiblox Charts different?
The answer is four-fold:
- Performance: Visiblox Charts was built from that very first proof of concept with the main focus of delivering on the performance front. Compared to the competition out there it's fast and it handles a lot of data. Enough said.
- Flexibility: Alas, in software, high performance usually involves a trade-off of some kind and Visiblox Charts is no different here. If you want to get the best performance out of Visiblox Charts, you're going to have to sacrifice a bit of customisability. But fear not! Wherever we've had to impose a limitation to preserve performance, or for any other reason, we've tried to offer an alternative without that limitation. By way of example, in most series types you can't template each individual point to completely change its presentation (note you _can_ still change the style of the series which for most cases is more than enough). If you do need the ability to change points individually (e.g. you need each point to show a different image), Visiblox Charts does offer that capability in the form of the TemplatedSeries. It might not offer quite the same performance but you're not missing out in terms of flexibility either, you choose what's important to you.
- Extensibility: It's not just performance and flexibility that we bring to the table though. Driven by the nature of Visiblox's genesis, it's always been on the forefront of our mind that we're not going to be able to deliver the perfect product for everyone's needs. No-one can. The range and diversity of use cases is simply too big and in some cases even contradictory. However, what we can do is make sure developers can extend Visiblox Charts easily to meet their needs. What does that mean in practice? If you need a different kind of series, say a box plot series, the extension points are there, you just need to write the bit of code that actually renders your boxes. If you need a different axis with some obscure domain specific tick generation? Extend AxisBase and generate those crazy ticks! At all the key points in our API you will find a base class that makes extension easy and an interface to implement if the base class absolutely doesn't do what you need.
- Interactivity: Traditional charting controls in the web space were usually based around some sort of server-side component generating images on the basis of HTTP requests. The huge advantage of desktop apps and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is interactivity. We've made that a first class citizen of our charting component, not an afterthought. Zooming, panning, trackballs, crosshairs, tool tips and annotations: it's all there out of the box and built into the chart's infrastructure, ready to go. Again, if we've missed something that you really need, we at least make sure that you can add it by providing base classes and interfaces for you to write your own behaviours.
Those four cornerstones make up "The Visiblox Way", if you will. They will continue to drive how we build our charts, and if we ever move beyond charts they will drive how we build our other offerings as well. Performance, Flexibility, Extensibility and Interactivity are what we're about.
Oh, and that financial client? They're using Visiblox Charts now.
Cheers,
Jesse
