If you haven’t heard of Flare, go check out the demo right now. I’ll wait.

Pretty cool, eh? Flare is an ActionScript port of Prefuse, a “set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations” written in Java. The development of both Prefuse and Flare were led by Jeff Heer, I believe as part of his Master’s thesis. I have recently begun to investigate Flare as a potential replacement for Flex charts in my current project at work and have been lucky enough to spend the past two weeks simply diving in and learning how to use the library. I needed to determine whether or not, and how easily, we can do everything we hope to on this project. My conclusion is that Flare is extremely powerful and will almost certainly support any kind of visualization we can think up.

That being said, our project is a Flex application, and Flare is simply an ActionScript library. It has a very basic wrapper component (FlareVis) that extends Flex’s Canvas component, which allows basic instantiation and configuration in MXML but the library is not especially Flex-friendly. My plan is to create some wrapper APIs and higher level classes that will make using Flare in Flex much easier. What is even cooler is that our awesome client has expressed their desire for these enhancements to be contributed back to the community so that others may benefit. There is a lot of work to be done but I am really excited to start making progress. For example, Flare doesn’t have specific components like a Bubble Chart, you simply have a base Visualization class that you customize and extend to create what you need. Developing with Flare has reminded me of my old AS2 days because of its dynamic qualities and freedom from the constraints the Flex framework places on you. (Note I am certainly not knocking Flex; its how I make my living and the only kind of serious AS3 work I have ever done.)

Flare works with lower level classes than you normally would in Flex, with Sprite being the core display class. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons you can attain such amazing performance with Flare. During one of my tests I animated 2000 bubbles on a chart with no noticeable slowdown or degradation, which I don’t think would be the case on a Flex chart. In case you are not aware, Sprites are like single frame MovieClips in Flash. They do not have an internal timeline, but they are a direct extension of DisplayObjectContainer, meaning they can contain child objects. They of course also have a graphics property that allows you to use the drawing API to customize their appearance. They are not UIComponents, so you cannot add them directly to containers in Flex, but that is not a big deal. You can add them as a child of a UIComponent instance, and then add the UIComponent to a container like usual.

That is probably enough introduction and rambling for now, but you can expect a steady stream of posts from me about various aspects of Flare, further experiments and progress on the wrapper APIs. For more frequent and less formal updates, you should follow me on Twitter here.