@artguate: "Say what you say, it simply has no substitute." I wouldn't be so sure about that. I 'think' I may have found one with great community support and used by huge companies, such as IBM, Oracle, Sun, Toyota, etc. It's called ZKoss. Take a look at their demo page. Their component set is even more extensive than what Flex offers. So, why am I looking at ZK? In analyzing our technology stack over the past decade+, we have gone through an evolving architecture (from DHTML using server side XSLT, to Flash 2004, to Flex). During the early days, we generated our J2EE web services with a product, Novell Composer. We thought we could trust Novell, but no! They end-of-lifed their product. So, we looked to go open source, as well as get out of the cross-browser hell of coding in JS. So, we moved to Spring/CXF web services and sought a solution that uses a VM plugin where we could truly write-once and run anywhere. Flash, and then Flex, seemed to fit that bill. Worked wonderfully well why the ride lasted. But, that's coming to an end (if not now, then in a few years when Adobe loses interest in supporting Flex in a Flashplayer that is clearly going to be focused on media and animation). In looking back, what has been the one constant that we could rely upon to not screw us over by abandoning us? The answer is Java. So, why not go with a Java based solution for the client? But, I didn't want a Java based solution that would require the client to have Java. This can be solved by server side transformation - something like JSP, but much better and with a rich component set. ZK is a satisfactory substitute for Flex, and it's easy to learn - especially if you already know Java.
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