Axiis – Release Date Announced

I wanted to give the community a quick update on Axiis (the data visualization framework Michael and I have been working on) as I have received a lot of interest from within the community after blogging about it a few weeks ago.   First, we have been hard at work improving the core layout and render engine getting ready for our initial alpha release, which will be on May 19th, 2008.    If that date sounds familiar, it should, it is right in the middle of 360 Flex, where my talk on data visualization will focus on Axiis and how I have been using to solve some of my advanced Flex Data Visualization needs.  Our first release will be very “alpha”, but we should have enough working bits for people to start playing around and get a taste of what we are doing.

In addition to working on our core code we have also been developing some pre-built components that will make creating common business data visualizations with cartesian and polar data visualizations a real snap.  Unlike traditional flex charts where you have to declare each series you want to graph, Axiis can be used to generate completely data driven designs, using auto-palettes to generate colors, and data shaping (via our DataSet component) to organize data into automated series.

 

Here is some sample code that declares the clustered stack chart you see above:

Here is the code that colors and styles the chart geometries:

In addition, I have built out template components that support Line Series, Area Series (stacks,overlays), Wedge/Pie Charts.   On the radar (time permitting) I hope to have scatter plot’s, bubble charts, and some alternative area layouts (steam graph and theme-river.)

We have spent the last two weeks focused on performance optimization and figuring out how to scale Axiis for rendering larger datasets of over 1000 data points.  I suspect the performance tuning is something that we will be working on/off for a while as we balance the performance needs against the design time pattern declaration flexibility that Axiis affords.

If Axiis interests you and you want to learn more I highly encourage you to attend 360 Flex as we will be doing a deep dive and actively looking for community feedback.  Outside of Axiis, if you have never been to a 360 Flex event and are a Flex developer I can’t recommend it highly enough, it is 3+ days of solid Flex learning.  If you are new to Flex it would be an amazing way to accelerate your learning curve, and if you have been using Flex for quite a while and want to hear directly from the experts how to solve those tough problems, this is the place to be.

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