ZingChart Plots to End the War between HTML5 and Flash in Web-Based Charting

April 8, 2010 - PRLog -- San Diego, CA  – The much anticipated iPad launch has had programmers and designers around the world fretting about the future of Flash ever since the infamous blue Lego made a cameo role in Steve Jobs’s iPad demonstration. The event spawned a heated debate of the merits of HTML5’s  tag and Flash.  Rather than focusing on a single technology, ZingChart closed the gap in web-based charting by launching ZingChart Flash +  to work everywhere.

ZingChart is a platform- and browser-agnostic charting library that enables programmers to deploy nearly identical charts in both Flash and HTML5  using a single JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file. With the launch of ZingChart Flash + , programmers and designers no longer need to make compromises when choosing a charting and graphing library.

Thomas Powell, ZingChart’s architect, sees the new product as a bridge between competing visualization technologies. “The launch of the iPad has created a rift between HTML5 programmers and Flash developers – with both sides making strong predictions as to what the future of the web will hold. With ZingChart, we’ve covered both sides of the equation and taken the ‘either/or’ dilemma out of building interactive charts and graphs. Not to mention the fact that ZingChart is as powerful and customizable as charting libraries come.”

The Flash vs.  debate is more than just a personal preference. Those involved in data visualization and information graphics are worried about performance and speed, especially when plotting large datasets. Through testing multiple scenarios, ZingChart found that many factors  -- such as number of data points, chart and library complexity, and browser -- influence chart load speed, and neither Flash nor  is a consistent winner across all test cases. Powell adds, “Rather than declare a victor, we will leave it up to designers and developers to decide what they prefer when making a visualization.”

With a torrent of data to analyze and visualize, format wars should be of little concern. ZingChart acknowledges that end users don’t care what a visualization is built in, they just want it to work everywhere.

ZingChart Flash +  is currently in a demonstration phase and is available for review at http://www.zingchart.com/flash-and-html5-canvas. ZingChart for Flash is available for trial download and purchase at http://www.zingchart.com/.

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About ZingChart
ZingChart is a project that emerged out of the development of a deep web analytics system that required a powerful charting library to process and plot large amounts of data. The available charting components buckled under the volume of data and lacked the desired cross-platform flexibility, so the team began the development of ZingChart in December 2008 and released version 1.0 in early 2010.