Just under a year ago the ILOG elixir team released a demo of their Flex charting components using data from the CIA world factbook. The result was a powerful mashup that shows off both the power of Elixir specifically and Flex in general. Elixir is one of the best visualization packages out there, combining a really powerful feature set with tight integration to FlexBuilder.

A new version of the demo was posted last Friday and looks really good. The new version expands upon the original by using PureMVC for the code, a better theme (by Juan Sanchez), and an updated UI. It also implements a few new views and adds drill down to the tree-map. It's a great example of what Flex was made for: powerful data visualizations that would be immensely difficult in traditional web languages.

If you've never tried Elixir, check out Getting Started from the Developer Center for information and a free sample of the framework. The full version does cost money, but cheap licenses are available for individual developers, and if you're working with lots of data visualizations this tool-kit is definitely worth the cost.

A few screen shots, courtesy of the Elixir blog:

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