My latest task at work involves UI development with some heavy duty charting.  At first, I pushed for investigating the use of Silverlight for the project.  After all, I spent enough time within the walls of Microsoft to taste the ”Kool-Aid” and believe in their teams and products.  At this time though, it’s way too early in Silverlight’s lifecycle for it to be of use for us.  It was almost immediately obvious that it will not be suitable our needs as we needed some heavyweight charting abilities that Silverlight just doesn’t have built in at this time. 

Flex, on the other hand, has a great charting API available right out of the box, and I must say, I am very impressed.  My initial inclination was that Flex was not going to be easy to work with, as I have done a minimal set of Flash work in the past and was frustrated with working within the platform.  Although, that was many, many years ago.  Flex, in conjunction with ActionScript 3, is much more straightforward to program in and get something up and running.  After installing Adobe Flex Builder 2, I was able to get a sample chart coded up in about 15 minutes.   

A couple weeks down the road since then, I have been “Flexing” away, customizing and tweaking some nice looking charts.  With the richness of the UI Flex offers, many of the controls have a ton of default highlight alphas, fill alphas, theme coloring, etc. that can easily become overwhelming to tweak for those that are not the most design savvy.  I came across the following tool that has been a great help in tweaking the look and feel of the Flex controls.  It’s called, Flex Style Explorer.  Within the explorer, you can change the styles of Flex controls and see that change updated dynamically right in front of you, so that you can see how the different UI options within the control behave relative to each other. 

If you are new to Flex, check it out.