One more point of contention, mostly to frame the difference between AJAX and Flex 2, and why there is such a disparity between the tooling. Flex 2 is a closed system, developed by a single company. It's hard to disagree that the tooling of the Flex 2 SDK in Eclipse is better than Ruby on Rails + Prototype.js in my Emacs editor. But even Flash/Flex suffers under browser incompatibilities (Object vs. Embed tag, SWFObject vs. UFO wrapper, etc...Flash 9 player funkyness on the Mac Intel platform.)
As for a Java Plug-in, can you name a single site that you use on a regular basis that has one. I can't, but I may not be looking in the right places.
BTW: Great stuff in your blog...and happy to see you are are using Linebuzz to open up the debate.
You seem to imply that a magical tool could be created to bridge one's understanding of the fundamentals of HTML rendering (and the manipulation of HTML/DOM with CSS and Javascript.) If AJAX isn't very deep, neither is HTML, DOM manipulation, CSS, or Javascript (since there is no AJAX without them.)
I'm curious how you have come around from WS* to REST, but don't see the value in keeping it simple for AJAX sans a massive, obfuscating framework to hide behind.
I would argue that the simplicity of AJAX style web development lends itself to being over-tooled. In most cases, websites don't even use the X in AJAX because navigating a second DOM from the response XML just isn't as easy as accessing elements of serialized Javascript. I think the complexity of AJAX is completely blown out of proportion.
That has to do with the options being passed to the flash object...I think that when the object tag (or embed tag...I would actually have to look at the source) you would need to pass in:
wmode=transparent
This allows dom objects to float above flash movies.
Weird...I have Safari 2.0.4 on my machine and I can't get it to work...I have an Intel Mac...are you using a PPC Mac (that's the only difference that I could think of...)
It's alright...it should be easy to fix...this is a great idea! I have been thinking of something very similar as of late, but I think this implementation is way better than the idea that I had.
