Flex or ColdFusion for charts?

[solaced]

My company want some management charts making (dashboards) and I don't understand the difference between using Flex or ColdFusion for the task.

My natural instinct is to make a ColdFusion page and use CF's charting capabilities. I understand that Flex is more about presentation layer so does that mean Flex's charting features are much better than ColdFusion's? Also why use Flex at all for presentation when there is already Flash available?

I'm sorry I don't understand the difference in these products.

[12Robots]

Flex is probably better than CF for charting if you don't mind requiring Flash.  Flex is just a framework for Flash, so technically you could do it all in Flash, but it would require 80,000 more lines of code (rough, exaggerated estimate).

CF Charts has options for Flash or Image charts. Image charts don't require flash, but also can't be interactive.

If it were me, I would use neither. I would use one of the incredible JS charting frameworks that are now available. For my projects I use HighCharts. http://www.highcharts.com/

Jason

[solaced]

Thanks for the suggestions.

The Highcharts library looks great. It seems like everything is going towards HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for Rich Internet Applications

So how does Flex fit into this?

[Dan_Bracuk]

It depends on your requirements.  The cfchart format = jpeg is handy because it's easy to copy the chart into emails, powerpoint presentations, etc.