PCFormat Forum Archive

Hey guys,

I've got to port an application to a website. It's quite simple and I've already got most of it waxed with ASP.NET 2.0. The only part I'm having a dilemma with is it needs to have real time graphing. What I would like is the graphing capability I get from pages such as:

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANVDA

I know nothing about flash. Do you think it would be worth my time and effort to learn flash and write an applet that could read some data of a SQL database and display it with more or less the above functionality? I'm a very quick learner but don't want to spend too much time on it. Do you think I'd be in over my head? Any other languages/methods to suggest would be greatly appreciated.

I haven't worked with flash, but I'm sure this is possible in Java. (forgive me for advocating Java, but I suppose cross-platform compatibility is its forte)
There are a few open-source graphing libraries available for Java, such as here which should suffice for plotting simple graphs. As I've said, I don't know jack about flash, but I have a hunch that it may be quicker getting to grips with Java than actionscript.

Edit: If you are prepared to use Java and use existing open-source code, then this looks to be a great API. Link.

Edit2: Hmm. Seems that the above libraries contain code to plot graphs, but probably don't contain much in the way for accessing remote databases if run client-side as an applet, though the graphing functions may still be useful to you. I still think Java would be a good approach, but Rusty should be your consultant.