The Evaluation
Our search led us to evaluate many charting tools, and the one that fit the bill was Nevron Chart for .Net from Nevron LLC (www.nevron.com). It has outstanding performance, professional charts, and flexibility in use and licensing terms that works well in our business model.
Recently, we had the opportunity to review our decision to go with Nevron in light of changes in the component space and the development of our recently released SmarterMail 4.x product (Figure 2). We entered the evaluation with several needs and wants for our products.
[Click image to view at full size]
Figure 2: SmarterMail.
Our needs include:
- Per-developer or per-development group licensing terms with no distribution royalties (even when the website portion of the product is hosted on servers owned by our customers).
- Flexible programming model allowing for the creation of charts through a designer or through backend code, with or without HttpContext and Page objects.
- High-performance engine capable of generating hundreds of thousands of charts per day on a machine not specialized to the task.
- Support for generating many charts at once on different threads.
- Support for the basic chart types (line charts, area charts, pie charts, and so on).
While not absolutely required, our wants included:
- Professional-looking graphs with features such as anti-aliasing, shadows, and margin configuration.
- Support for customization to the look-and-feel of the chart like the legend, Axis, and so on.
- Support for 2D and 3D charts in real perspective (not just a few lines added on to "fake" 3D).
