The more I read about Flex the more I am convinced Flex is the way to go. For me the bigger question is how long HTML and its descendents will last. HTML was really useful but know it is just too incapable and simply it has no memory. It's intelligence is also usually supported with scripting languages such as JavaScript which is a beast of its own kind. Look at the complexity of Java front end frameworks. There is tons of them and still neither has a neat solution to the front end puzzle. The Java front end code is usually terrible. It really takes very good developers to come up with a web based GUI in Java that is well designed and it is easy to maintain. However, this is not what we want. We want stupid programmers to be able to produce. Java front end model is suffering from HTML shortcomings. Mostly from its lack of memory. That is, a request should be sent to user for every time a data is updated and server should keep this in memory for the scope of a conversation. Think of a form that adds items incrementally and as user presses save the changes are flushed to database. This will require Java code to take care of the temporary list of Items. That is why we have request scope variable, session scope variable and application scope variables. These are all a problem when it comes to scaling. In any events, Flex seems to be the answer. At least it is a great improvement. It has memory. It is richer that HTML and it can customized the same way. Even Microsoft is pushing its SilverLite.
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Regarding its current licensing scheme I guess it can't go anywhere. The only feasible path for success of both Adobe Flex, MS Silverlite is forgetting commercial licenses on dev tools (such as Flex builder which itself is built on Eclipse, ironically!) and try to earn those $s by commercial support and maybe specialized libraries. The other player in this ground is which takes this need into account (by supporting OpenLaszlo) but obviously is not as vocal as MS and Adobe.
Just my 2 cents as a developer (not a biz guy!)
I have to agree to much of your comment but still I am waiting for open source community to take action on this. Chances are open source IDE will roll in soon. I know IntelliJ IDEA is adding support for Flex so there is an interest and there is a possibility. By the way, thanks for the link. I like to know more about it.
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