Flex for chart based reporting having Java/Oracle backend

My only experience with Flex is some limited reading over the web. What i am wondering is if i want to use Flex or some variant of it for generating reports, specifically Charts, coming off a Java/Oracl开发者_JAVA技巧e backend can i accomplish that in an environment where the streaming media (we cannot play videos on our systems at work) is turned off? Also, are there any other restrictions revolving around using Flex for reporting in the form of charts? Currently, we use Jfree Chart API to develop charts but just exploring an alternative.

Flex has a pretty decent charting API, and there are other nice charting packages out there. Overall, I would say this is a decent solution, keeping in mind you need to be able to play Flash videos in your browser (since Flex runs in the Flash player).

You'll need to create a service from Java which provides data to the client; you can do this using REST, BlazeDS (which allows the server to "push" data to the client), or some other type of Web service. If you want a desktop-based client, check out AIR.

Keep this in mind: the Flash player is single-threaded. If your project requires multi-threaded functionality, you won't get it from Flex. Though it's event-driven, at the end of the day, all processing goes through a single thread and can create a bit of a bottleneck for heavy lifting.

Though some libraries are not free, Adobe opened up their data visualization library back in Flex 3.5: it's free to use.

Here are some helpful links:

• Adobe's Chart Types LiveDocs
• Degrafa
• Axiis
• AM Charts

The flex option is very good for charting (we did a full charts/visualizations based app with C# backend and Flex frontend). We then, with quite minor changes, turned it into a desktop app by converting it to an Adobe Air install, with C# running locally and talking to mysql. Java is better supported by adobe though, and easier to link to Flex