I have been keenly following this thread on Flash. I have worked with Flash extensively since version 3. The tools and the medium have evolved considerably. There used to be so much hesitation to use DHTML then browsers evolved. Interestingly Flash always functioned if you had the player. Flex is a very interesting authoring environment built on the Flash platform. You can rapidly prototype with it, almost eliminating the need for wireframing; in fact one could extend your application to display design notes if you want. With some know-how you can can easily connect your application to XML data. What Flash brought to web development was not only animation but the ability to separate content from form - before CSS and XML became the rage. AJAX still forces you to stay within a vertical-horizontal grid [please correct me here] The power of Flash is the ability to work with the screen as if it is blank sheet. You can create organic shaped objects. Flash also encouraged creating back-end independent applications - so they can be desktop or with a Java or .Net or whatever backend. Flex, however, encourages you to use web services which unfortunately bind you the back-end - so you don't need PHP or ASP. Silverlight (I have not used it yet) also does exactly this - in fact you use Visual Studio (.NET) Long story short, if you work in a .NET shop Silverlight may most probably be the way to go; if not then go AJAX or Flash/Flex. I prefer Flash/Flex (see above for organic shapes).
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