Hi. What about Curl ? you ve not named curl in your article. Is it so bad that it can not compete with RIA technologies like Ajax, Flex, AIR, Silverlight etc ?
I wish you could ve included Curl too. I'm new to web dev, and started learning Curl. Its easy to understand and learn.

Hey Jeff. Interesting article. We have found that our users don't have to choose. Our JavaServer Faces framework generates both Ajax and Flash markup. Other companies (google, etc.) do similar things as well. I think the choice only comes into play if you decide to use Adobe's Flex components, which only generate flash. Many other component toolkits generate multiple formats, including Ajax, Flash, WML, XML, etc.

Ted Farrell - Oracle Corporation

Hi,
nice piece of article !
I had a speach at the Web 2.0 about this topic titled "Choosing the final RIA path" :
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/2007/11/using-the-ria-d.html

http://blog.comtaste.com/2007/11/choosing_the_appropriate_ria_t_1.html

and here you can see the slides for my talk :

http://www.slideshare.net/marcocasario/choosing-the-right-rich-internet-...

See you at AJAXWorld NY,
All the best,
marco

Hi,

Thank you for this interesting topic,
Could you please expand this topic with the accessibility possibilities of both solutions ?
In my mind, it seems that Flex does not support accessibility and with some customization AJAX frameworks like GWT are able to handle this major subject (we're currently working on this topic using GWT). Regards.

Just stumbled upon this article... Pretty embarrassing for senior analyst at Forrester Research to come up with this b...t. Forrester, get rid of him, seriously.

You forgot to mention that Flex is object oriented. JavaScript is pseudo-OOP at best. After all these years, are we still debating about whether or not OOP is important? That is crazy!

As already mentioned in the Canoo RIA blog, reading this article is recommended. It lists several issues to consider that many others focusing on mere technical aspects leave out.

For a detailed discussion of this article, see:

http://canoo.com/blog/2007/08/15/how-to-select-ria-technologies-part-1-o...

Digg this? Dump this you mean! I suggest to use both technologies before writing this kind of articles. Flex is simply the technology to use - if you would have used it you would know.

This article generated more questions in my mind than it helped with answers.

What about the Flex/Ajax bridge? What about companies that will continue to use both Flex and Ajax for a variety of different means?

What I really need is more useful information on how these technologies help address various types of business problems that are being translated into technical requirements.

What are people's main concerns? Mine are security and performance between the client and server. XML based services can be very verbose, are test show that Flex can have some advantages here, but what are other people finding out?

What are the cost differences?

Hopefully you can address these questions in a follow-on article.

I'm afraid you are wrong on a number of points here. This is not subjective, but mostly factual errors. Have a read of this http://blog.schematic.com.au/?p=46 , it goes some way to pointing them out.