I’ve been working on a user interface to our behavioral metrics system as an easy project to get more into AS3. Our system uses web services to communicate with the back-end DB, so when I opened up CS4 I went looking for the WebService class. Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find anything.
A few searches later, it appears that the WebService class from prior Flash versions is no more. Very odd, kind of like the missing 3rd-party help in CS 4 (still can’t figure that one out — how could Adobe drop such a feature?).
Anyway, I came across this web service class library by Carlo Alducente, which is fabulous. It saved me a lot of time and it was free. Thank you so much, Carlo!
On the subject of plots and graphs, I found a great, basic set over at Yahoo, the Yahoo Flash Astra Components. It has a set of bar, line, and pie charts which are easy to adapt and use. Then there are a bunch of other components in the set, such as for canvas layout.