Over the last week, I’ve been working on a new Flex component, a heatmap! For those unfamiliar, a heatmap is a form of data visualization that uses color on a two-dimensional plane to compare values. Most recently, in the Flex community, heatmaps have been made famous by Universal Mind’s Spatial Key application. After seeing that go live, I knew people would be interested in an open source heatmap component for Flex, so I put one together and dropped it on Esria’s open source and community site.
Overall, I found the process of building this component very straightforward. There are many similarities to my treemap component, but the heatmap is a bit simpler in many regards. One thing I particularly enjoyed about building the heatmap was that it required some pretty heavy optimization. Since it could potentially display massive data sets, manipulating the data provider and extracting the required numbers needs to be fast. I spent a lot of time diving into Flex Builder’s profiler. By the way, Jun Heider’s profiler session at 360Flex has some great info that helped me understand the profiler’s numbers better. I highly recommend checking it out.
