Flex is for creating more expressive and more usable internet apps. It has the ability to display more complex, fluid, and beautiful interfaces, as well as being able to perform more in the way of client-side processing.

Did that answer your question, or did it sound like marketing-speak? :-)

Another question: could Flex be used to build this: http://time2wonder.blogspot.com/2005/06/online-tool-tot.html ? That would be really cool..

As you say, integration with the web as it exists is necessary before RIAs as websites can really start to change things.

I can create a blog app in Flex, but unless Google crawls it, I’m pretty much talking to myself!

BTW, I agree 100% with your comments, especially regarding the infrastructure of the existing web. People often talk about the “back button problem” or the “bookmarking problem” when it comes to Flash-based apps. These are really misleading ways to talk about the problem. The issue isn’t that bookmarking is so important. The issue is that the entire web is put together with the assumption that (a) an app can be decomposed into lots of independent pieces, and that (b) each piece has a URL which uniquely identifies it. (you can see where I stand on the REST issue…)

There are other pieces to this as well, such as the fact that historically, the connections between these pieces have been declarative (i.e., the <a> tag), and thus discoverable by web crawlers.

These are hard problems, but we’re thinking about them.

To me RIAs are about evolving the web to the next level in terms of usability and functionality. Providing services and interfaces that can’t be done in HTML. And not just for a specific application for a specific website, I mean for the web as a whole.

Eventually we’ll be at the point where there is no line between desktop and web, but that’s still a long ways off. But as this happens, I think it will be moreso the Internet’s design that influences the desktop rather than the other way around. We can see some of this already with Google desktop search, or even Microsoft’s XML UI description language in Avalon.

But in order for RIAs to become the norm of the Internet some key things need to be looked after. As they stand, RIAs are NOT ready to replace most web sites.

What I really want (I guess) is a replacement for HTML. Something that retains the huge power of the web but extends the interface. The biggest problem with RIAs as they stand is they break the existing Internet structure. I can easily link the URL of a news story on CNN, but I can’t do that with a specific “page” in a Flex app. What’s needed is a way to represent the RIA’s state so that it can be recreated by another RIA.

Or maybe I’m still too stuck in the traditional web app mindset? But I don’t see RIA’s redifining how information on the Internet itself is structured anytime soon.

Unfortunately it looks to me that things like Flex are being targeted more towards things like “client-server apps with easier deployment” for corporate Intranets and single apps within an existing web presence when what I really want is the next “version” of the Internet.