AJAX vs. Flex

[glg1]

Hi all,
I posted a similiar appeal in the new Flex forum, but I wanted to get all sides. Basically, I've been looking at Flex for a little while and from all that I can learn, it appears to be an easier choice for development currently than AJAX or other DHTML approaches. From my view, this is mostly because Flex builder is easier to learn from a novice or mid-level programmer, and is a more integrated and mature IDE than anything out there in Ajax. However, given the excitement around Ajax, and not of Flex, I suspect that I'm missing something... Open source, vs. Macromedia, Actionscript vs. javascript, Flash implementation vs. HTML, ???

Looking for opinions,

Thanks, George

 

[manarth]

from the Macromedia FAQ

Applications developed with Flex 2 product line will require Flash Player 8.5.

What is Macromedia Flex 1.5?
Macromedia Flex 1.5 is a presentation server and application framework

To use Flex, you need to run a Flex application server. Unlike plain old HTML, you can't simply serve it up using Apache or IIS.

For traditional HTML-based applications, both ColdFusion and JRun are complete solutions.

For Rich Internet Applications, ColdFusion and JRun continue to be excellent solutions for delivering the business-logic tier that powers a presentation tier based on Flex

So Flex is all about the presentation.

Here's the Flex demo from the Macromedia site. I advice you to View Source of the produced code that powers it - hint: most web developers would consider this to be a load of carp. Looks pretty, but still carp.

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Marcus
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