I'd encourage those with negative preconceptions about Flash UI to
withhold judgement. That platform has been radically upgraded and we're
probably just a few months away from seeing a wave of web applications
with very nice Flash-based user interfaces.
Granted AJAX has the lead currently, and is more a standards track
approach. The drawbacks to AJAX are the development resources required
and user-agent (browser) compliance issues.
Developing to the AJAX target currently requires pretty top drawer
skills in a number of departments: XML, CSS, Javascript, DOM, DHTML,
etc. Tools are certainly coming along, but it's hardly an operation for
the meek at this point. Flash is proprietary, but the proprietary
owners have gone to the trouble of creating some pretty nice tools.
As for user-agents, well, AJAX is still basically DHTML and that means
much suffering over browser compliance. Flash apps have the advantage
of being able to update their container (the Flash engine) pretty much
seamlessly.
And there are going to be other candidates in the not-HTML,
rich-client-over-the-web technology runoff. Like XUL. And that other
XULish thing coming from Redmond.
For another nice demo of some Flash rich-client UI, get yerself a test
account here:
<http://www.laszlomail.com/lzmail/>
It's a full webmail client, and pretty darn slick. Made with OpenLazlo,
an open-source toolkit for producing Flash-based rich client apps.
--rt
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