Video: Developing in Flex vs Ajax with Randy Fong (2:20)

@Frank

come on... have you seen Firefox's resource usage as of late ?

what *serious* fully featured application have you seen "in ajax" without reloading context ?

aren't you perhaps biased by a negative experience of pre-flash9 hideous intro screens circa year 2000 ?

besides... we are talking about the future, not my grandma's Pentium III
how efficient is for you a 1.4 Mb runtime ?
what sort of applications are you running ?

could you please back your statement with facts ?

AJAX with synced caches! Silverlight was a nice science experiment but a non-issue from the get-go. Flash's CPU load makes it a real problem, which is mostly due to Adobe being inept when it comes to resource management.

If Flash were in the hands of a more capable company it might be a contender for the future.

forgot to mention...

As the mobile internet space explodes (scheduled for 2008 !) these players are accomodating themselves to grab as much land as possible on mobile devices.

Google has recently announced they intend to be a player in that space, with their new mobile OS called Android. (which according to the NY Times, is based on Java and Linux)
If Sun and Google manage to collaborate, rather than compete in the mobile internet space, we will be seeing a very interesting panorama in Q3 2008.
(So much that Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz felt compelled to blog about Android the day it was formally announced, even though Sun is not part of The Open Handset Alliance *yet*)

The Android SDK is scheduled for release Nov. 12.

JavaFX
http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp

Android and Open Handset Alliance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_mobile_pho...
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com

Flex all the way.
It uses the Flash runtime that has some 98% installed user base, the new virtual machine runs 10 times as fast as the older one, the compiler is free and will soon be open source, the languages are familiar, based on XML, Javascript/ECMAscript and CSS. When coupled with Adobe AIR, the applications can be integrated with the desktop environment.

Ajax was some good transitional technology, but I doubt it will ever be solid and responsive enough to develop full-blown desktop applications. (Meebo and Gmail being the sole great, solid Ajax applications I've seen, at a huge development cost that only makes sense when you put millions of users into the equation)
There's great projects like Dojo and Scriptaculous that greatly ease this task, but the fact remains... when confronted with a system that runs on a virtual machine, it just pales by comparison.


Silverlight barely runs on Windows and support for other systems -despite hype- is yet to be seen.
Noone supports Silverlight but Microsoft (and on paper, somewhat.. Novell). There's a severe lack of trust about them wanting to pollute the web with proprietary code, to the point of forcing everybody to use their products if you want to see the web at all. (Internet Explorer, Anti-trust, anyone ?)

There's also a few other important players:
Sun's JavaFX, OpenLaszlo by Laszlo Systems, and Curl, but for now it seems like the big play is between Microsoft and Adobe.

The other big player could be Mozilla, they could be doing something about it too leveraging their marketshare, but they haven't announced a concrete product on this arena yet.