SHOWCASE

Dashboard with Flex

CLIENT

Various clients.
We’ve included all of our experience in creating dashboard applications in Flex under one case study, because all our numerous client projects are based on one common denominator: the need to represent data concisely and efficiently.

CONTEXT

Clients have called in Comtaste to support them in the creation of dashboard applications in Flex in a wide range of contexts. Sometimes we’ve faced technological legacies, where a dashboard application was simply an efficient and painless innovative solution, other times we’ve faced evolved contexts from a technological point of view and simply improved the underlying business logic, thanks to Flex, in terms of user interaction.

Here are a few of the frequent contexts and challenges we’ve managed to solve with dashboards in Flex:

• management applications in AS400; in these cases the non-graphical environment didn’t display data that allowed users to understand it “at a glance”.
• web applications, which, in order to allow dashboard functions that are interactive enough, require the support of desktop applications, with the obvious limitations this implies in terms of distribution
• JEE applications, in which the graphical representation and presentation of equal level data performance doesn’t match the robustness of the language (unless you introduce another level of complexity by introducing a tailor made framework).

SOLUTIONS

Comtaste intervened in its typical consultant role in both phases of the process: initial presentation of options and choice of technology, and the implementation phase.
The choice to provide a Flex solution in these contexts was determined by a wide range of considerations.
First of all, Flex allows you to deploy applications that, when they run on the very popular Flash player, have the advantage of being cross browser and cross platform.

In terms of development, the number of libraries available on this platform is highly relevant, which makes it an extraordinary tool to create complex interactive graphics. From this point of view, Flex is definitely the better choice compared to html (which is only able to produce static graphics, as it doesn’t have any graphical libraries) and compared to AJAX (which doesn’t provide a wide enough range of graphical libraries to allow acceptable time frames and development costs).

Furthermore, Flex is a very versatile “presentation tier” as it is able to access a wider range of data, regardless of the technology and the architecture used for the business logic.
The joint consideration of these characteristics brought to the growing affirmation requests to build dashboard applications in Flex that were able to offer a high level of user experience.
The wide range of projects we have faced have allowed us to create solutions and custom libraries that improve the speed of our client support services in various kinds of contexts.