How do I make an Adobe Flash/Flex Chart Component “from scratch” (with AS3/MXML)?

Question

I'm interested in creating a Adobe Flash UI component for charting/graphing. I'm not interested in a library to do the charting; rather, I'm looking for books, articles, or open-source projects from which I could learn to develop a charting component (ie. one that extends the Sprite logical base class if done in pure ActionScript 3.0 Flash, or perhaps UIComponent/ChartBase/CartesianChart if done in Flex).

Please tell me some resources, books and stuff that I could use to create this component "from scratch".

See also Adobe Flash: Making an Interactive Charting UI Component “from scratch” (without Flex) for the specific case of a non-Flex charting component. That is, in Flash with pure ActionScript 3.0.

Answer 1

The best and easiest graphics framework I've seen is degrafa .

Here is a brief comparison between degrafa and the native drawing api. I believe that much of the way degrapha does things has been worked into the new flex 4 (but still in beta) framework.

For specific charts Axiis is an open source data visualization framework built using degrafa.

For creating components these MAX presentations should jump start you:

Creating new components in flex 3.

Diving deep with the flex component lifecycle.

Answer 2

I've tried it myself and didn't think it was the hassle to do it from scratch. My best advice to you is to use Flex built in chart controls. But if you prefer to do it manually so the first thing to do is to do some rectangles, if you want to do a bar chart. http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/display/Graphics.html

Answer 3

Take a look at Open Flash Chart. Nice looking charts with source code written in Flash. Even if you want to write your own, you can take a look at some code to get some ideas.

Answer 4

An interesting book that could help you is "Flex 4 fun". But the book covers only the graphics part of the problem. It could be a start...