Lately I had some interesting conversations with few of my developer friends regarding their opinions on which technology will rule the Rich Application Interfaces websites in the future. My strong believe is that there’s room for all four of these as per my experience and actual trends. More over, all these will have a separate slice of the market but overlap at only few areas. Let’s take AJAX as example – it is widely popular for creating rich user experience community building apps,  portals, mash-ups and so on. On the other hand, Flex is used more for multimedia rich requirements, interactive maps for example, photo albums, portfolios, games etc. Another technology, Silverlight, is a direct competition to Flex, but its presence is more dominant in the Enterprise applications market.

Adobe’s Flex has a big advantage of running on the Flash platform, inheriting a very wide reach on the internet and having also an integrated support from other Adobe products, like Photoshop, After Effects, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator. Also some near future upcoming products – Catalyst, Thermo, Cocomo, and more will be closely integrated with the legacy platform. All these are reliable, proven technology in web industry, being leading tools for creating visually rich media, no matter that is composed from images, animations or videos. Besides all, the new AIR version brings even more value by having a desktop version of an app that is integrated with the online one. More >