The Evolution of Advanced Web Graphing
I've been working with the Google Visualization AnnotatedTimeLine widget, and it's nice - no doubt about it, but it's still a Flash-based widget. It's nice to know that the Table widget is now all CSS - it was originally a Flash component, but the AnnotatedTimeLine is still Flash, and it's not as snappy as it could be.
Sure, the AnnotatedTimeLine might not be meant to do the kind of graphing that I'm doing, but it's close. I've been missing the level of completeness that VantagePoint had in Java, but that's not really an answer, either - I can't go back to Java plugins and all the problems we had with that back at my old place. But still... there needs to be something better.
Normally, I'd say "Google will get there - eventually", but this is really something that needs to be done. The HTML 5 Canvas object has allowed quite a few implementations of nice graphing packages, but they aren't focused on the scientific plotting that I'm looking for. They are really focused at the business presentation graphing. Nice backgrounds, fewer data points.
What I need is something completely new and original. I need to have something that doesn't force me to reload all the data from the source - that's my first real killer problem. If I could send incremental updates, then I could stop sending these enormous JSON strings to the client for parsing. I'm not positive, but I'll bet that the memory problems I'm having now are a direct result of that.
Still, there's nothing I can really do - save start to write one on my own. If I want to leverage the work Google has started, then I just need to sit tight and hope that I'm not the only one that has this same set of issues. I'm probably not, but then again, if this is a Google "20% Project", it's unlikely that the developers will think what I need is really what they need to write. And there's no way I'm getting the source code, that's for certain.
VantagePoint is orphaned now, and that's a tragedy as they might have been one to move into this space, but alas, that's not to be.
It's just frustrating to know what needs to be done to make this a really stellar package, and not be able to get in there and fix it. But we all need to learn to live with disappointment.