Chart FX and AJAX

Chart FX and AJAX

Developers face important challenges when building truly interactive web applications because of the stateless nature of the web. For one, round trips to the server impact end user experience and negatively affect the application’s performance, but most importantly, with every page refresh the application ends up losing the focus of its input controls like edit and combo boxes.

To alleviate this situation, Visual Studio incorporates out of band callbacks that allow developers to build web applications that can actually make a call back to the server and fetch new data without having to refresh the entire page.

Chart FX 7 takes advantage of the out of band callbacks capability and combines it with a powerful DHTML engine to produce chart images that allow full interactivity and support state in web applications.

Among other things, the Chart FX DHTML rendering engine allows developers to:

• Prevent downloading, configuration and use of ActiveX or .NET components making the application platform agnostic and maintenance free.
• Deploy charts that are fully secured as no binary files are needed in the browser.
• Access a fully interactive toolbar with drop-down menus that support most Chart FX end user functionality, including zooming and scrolling providing a much smoother client experience, while still maintaining the full flexibility of deploying to any browser client in the enterprise.

While the user is interacting with the chart, the Chart FX DHTML rendering engine will automatically update the chart with the new data. While this takes place, end users don't lose any of their chart settings, they don't get the appearance of a complete page refresh, and Internet Explorer didn't need to download the entire page content again; it only updated the one portion of the chart that changed.