Free Flash Charting Control for ASP.NET, PHP and More
I have recently been working on a management dashboard for an e-commerce website and needed a good charting control to display an overview of sales, registrations etc.
After a brief crawl on the web I came across Fusion Charts. The controls are as neat and easy to use as any of the premium solutions I could find, but best of all, the basic package is completely free, even for commercial use.
The free version of Fusion Charts is not lacking in functionality either, with a huge range of charts and good examples of code for multiple platforms you will be suprised how quickly you can get a really professional and useful chart integrated with your application. Below is a simple example of Fusion Charts in action:
Integration of the charts is as simple as copying the chart folder to the root of your application, creating the required xml data then embedding your chart in your html page. A sample of the xml data can be seen below:
<graph caption='Monthly Unit Sales' xAxisName='Month' yAxisName='Units' showNames='1' decimalPrecision='0' formatNumberScale='0'>
<set name='Jan' value='462' color='AFD8F8' />
<set name='Feb' value='857' color='F6BD0F' />
<set name='Mar' value='671' color='8BBA00' />
<set name='Apr' value='494' color='FF8E46' />
<set name='May' value='761' color='008E8E' />
<set name='Jun' value='960' color='D64646' />
<set name='Jul' value='629' color='8E468E' />
<set name='Aug' value='622' color='588526' />
<set name='Sep' value='376' color='B3AA00' />
<set name='Oct' value='494' color='008ED6' />
<set name='Nov' value='761' color='9D080D' />
<set name='Dec' value='960' color='A186BE' />
</graph>
Fusion charts have now appeared all over my applications and I still haven’t run out of options, but I know that if I do need more charting power I can easily upgrade to their premium charting controls which have all the charting functionality you could think of.
Fusion charts have great examples for chart integration with PHP, ASP, VB.NET (ASP.NET) and C# (ASP.NET) you can find out more at http://www.fusioncharts.com/Free/