There is this blog and a nice looking demo showing how AJAX can happily live together with Flex charting. This vendor ‘s AJAX grid component is populated with the data first, and then using FABridge the data is being passed to the Flex Charting component. Typically blogs demos like this get a number of Wows , and I expect several “Cool, man ” comments to this blog within the next day or so.

Since the blog authors have provided the decription of how this demo was made, I ‘ve read it and these are some of my questions/concerns.

I understand that these guys need to promote their AJAX grid component, and that ‘s why they ‘ve published this blog, but let me ask you this: if I ‘m planning to pass data to Flex components anyway, why on Earth not just use Flex Data Grid in the first place?

The authors honestly admit: “To ensure that the details grid is still fast, we only render the part of the dataset that the user is looking at rather than rendering all 1000 records say, which can take a long time when you use the DOM innerHTML property. ” That ‘s right guys, and instead of jumping through various hoops to overcome such issues, just use Flex DataGrid – it would be much faster.

Keep reading…

“All of the sales data is transported from server to the client using Ajax, but subsequently massaged using XSLT and rendered using the FABridge and Flex Charting 2. This approach is particularly attractive since it enables us to preserve the way each tier in our application works as an Ajax application, and simply extend the application to include Flex. ”

If you ‘d use just Flex, you would not need to use XSL transformation to pass the grouped data to Flex. After doing your grouping on the server side, and sending the data to Flex collection once, and using data binding, both controls would be populated.

Guys, I really wish you all the best in selling your AJAX grid, bit I ‘ll be honest with you: I won ‘t buy it. And you did not convince me that this demo is the right use of FABridge.