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  Something to look at
Posted by Mark Manning on Jul-30-2010 02:17
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I was surfing the net and found this: http://thejit.org/demos/

Those are some really nice Javascript based charts.  You guys might want to look at this.  I was really amazed!  :-)

  Re: Something to look at
Posted by Mark Manning on Jul-30-2010 02:40
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By the way - these are nice to look at, but if you bring up Task Manager (or do a top in Linux) - these things take over 300MB to run!!!!  So they are nice to look at but exorbitant in their memory usage.  Which brings up the question of why IE and FireFox use so much memory just to have a drawing canvas?  32bitx1280x1024 is only 41,943,040 bits (5,242,880 bytes or 5.2MB) which should never change (unless they double-buffer it which is still only 11.5MB).  So why they use over 300MB is a bit beyond me.  That's more than ten times the memory needed to draw to a canvas.

There is a great drawing package called Raphael which I used to be quite active in.  We were thinking of using it to do graphics on the fly.  Trouble is - both FireFox and IE begin gobbling up memory.  A simple pie chart program written in Raphael (which really looked great btw) used over 200MB of memory.  Very limited graphics and animation.  Since we are dealing with thousands of users the nightmare scenario was that all of those users would all be calling us asking why their browsers were using up all available memory.  Which led us on the path to here!  :-)

If you are trying to do simple graphical things (or you just don't care about your browser sucking up all available memory) then using the canvas part of Javascript is great!  Otherwise, you'd do better using Flash, Java, or something along those lines and taking the one-time memory hit which those languages have (which are a lot less than the 200MB-400MB the Javascript Canvas problem causes).

One of the nice things about ChartDirector is - it doesn't gobble up browser memory because the charts are created outside of the browser itself and only the results are displayed.  :-)

Mark