I'm interested in creating a Adobe Flash UI component for charting/graphing. I'm not interested in a library to do the charting; rather, I'm looking for books, articles, or open-source projects from which I could learn to develop a charting component (ie. one that extends the Sprite logical base class if done in pure ActionScript 3.0 Flash, or perhaps UIComponent/ChartBase/CartesianChart if done in Flex).
Please tell me some resources, books and stuff that I could use to create this component "from scratch".
See also Adobe Flash: Making an Interactive Charting UI Component “from scratch” (without Flex) for the specific case of a non-Flex charting component. That is, in Flash with pure ActionScript 3.0.
Best Answer
The best and easiest graphics framework I've seen is degrafa .
Here is a brief comparison between degrafa and the native drawing api. I believe that much of the way degrapha does things has been worked into the new flex 4 (but still in beta) framework.
For specific charts Axiis is an open source data visualization framework built using degrafa.
For creating components these MAX presentations should jump start you:
Creating new components in flex 3.
Diving deep with the flex component lifecycle.