One of my clients ask me to make a link exchange site for his affiliate program. The system will be similar to Entrecard; where users post ads of other affiliate earning them points. The more points a particular site has the more chances it has for getting displayed on other users’ websites. The points system is somewhat vague at the moment, it is still subject for my client’s approval, so I can’t really get into details about it.
One other requirement was for the “system” to save statistics for each site. Instead of displaying the data in a tabular form I opted to use an Adsense inspired interface which uses a flash graph to display the data. So I started to look for a viable solution for what I wanted to achieve. This is where I discovered Open Flash Chart project which does exactly what I wanted for FREE! Yes It’s free and open-source! What else could you ask for?
Open Flash Chart 2 Sample
Above is a screenshot of the sample graph I mocked up within the “system” I am currently coding. There are several things I like about Open Flash Chart aside from it being free and open source:
- Bundled with server side libraries to interface witht he SWF file such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Perl among others.
- Uses JSON as the data file
- Easily interfaces with jQuery
- Lots of different types of graphs to choose from e.g. Bar, area, line and radar graphs
I look forward to future releases and features of this project, Kudos to the developers who’ve done and continually doing an excellent job!
