More and more customers are building dashboards and other rich line of business applications for Silverlight and WPF are discovering the potential of these platforms for data visualization. Not only are UI frameworks constantly evolving but there are new advancements in the field of dataViz itself which make the whole ecosystem even more interesting. Keeping up with with the industry trends Telerik is expanding it’s product portfolio with new controls to enable our customers to build fast, robust and rich dashboards in minutes.
One such addition which I will talk about today is our new sparklines controls. At first look the sparkline seems like a minified chart control, but the graphic has a fundamentally different purpose and application. Here is a short description:
A sparkline is a type of information graphic characterized by its small size and high data density. Sparklines present trends and variations associated with some measurement, such as average temperature or stock market activity, in a simple and condensed way. Several sparklines are often used together as elements of a small multiple. (To learn more about the theory of sparklines from their creator Edward Tufte click this link)
Many component vendors are not realizing this difference and are using their chart controls to emulate a sparkline instead. Our team decided that best way to bring sparklines to our customers is to make them first class citizens in our suite. But what is this? Why am I speaking in plural? Why, yes, this is because we are actually shipping five different controls under the Sparklines product:
So the question you are probably asking yourselves is – why should I use RadSparklines instead of just a regular chart control? Well, that’s an excellent question and here are some answers which should help you decide:
We hope you like the 5 new sparkline controls. If you have feedback for us don’t hesitate to share it!
Happy dashboarding!
Vladimir Milev is a developer manager.