I recently had a requirement to create a proof-of-concept "what-if" calculator for a new product I'm involved in which will launch in the first quarter of next year.

Now, I prefer to write web-based applications because I hate supporting multiple operating systems and client versions (yes, I'm aware that different browsers behave differently, but there are a number of toolkits out there that solve most of those problems). However, this calculator required some pretty graphs (for non-techie types) and I didn't want to go to the effort of writing and deploying a server-based application for a simple calculator.

I went searching and I found there has been some work recently in the realm of browser-based graphics (either SVG or the Canvas tag) but, as with most new things, different browsers handled different things, well, differently. So I searched a little more and found a library called PlotKit which not only wrapped up the different graphics libraries (through a Google's ExplorerCanvas), but it also provides a ready-to-use graphing library.

Web-based development is becoming increasingly more powerful and I think we will continue to see the trend towards web-based applications continuing. Long live the browser!