Chris Harrington is a true beleiver in power of XML for Analysis standard (check out some of his quotes in this recent article in Enterprise Systems). He was early adopter of this technology, and he started a blog in 2003 about all kinds of interesting things that are possible with XMLA - like generating PowerPoint presentations from XMLA. Last month, Chris resurrected the blog, but unfortunatelly there is no RSS feed for it - so it is somewhat hard to keep up with the recent changes. So when I checked out what's new there today, I was blown away by the latest entry - “FLEXpart: Flexible OLAP charting with XMLA and OWC”. The idea is so simple, yet so powerful - to feed the XML from the XMLA response to the Office's ChartSpace component - to generate OLAP charts either in IE on the client or in ASP page server side. This is just such a great proof that XMLA is the right choice for the system interopbility because of its reliance on XML. Such integration between the two different components - Office Charts and Analysis Services would've been much more difficult (althouth not impossible as proved by Richard Lees) without XML. Here is how the sample screenshot looks like:
