Ajaxian picked up on new travel site Vayama.com which focuses on finding the best fares and schedules for international flights. It has a very cool interface and uses a combination of Ajax and Flex to provide a pretty slick interface. It looks like Flex is primarily used to display an interactive map to show the actual travel route and once you pull up fares, you can actually display multiple routes on the Flex map. Pretty cool!

For all the doubters, I just wanted to say that the Flex books are in transit:Programming Flex 2: The comprehensive guide to creating rich media applications with Adobe Flex The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 Thus continues my trek on learning Flex!

Over the last year, I've had many conversations about Flex with the likes of Ryan Stewart and Rob Gonda. Now these are two guys that I REALLY respect and because of that, I've decided to take a serious look at Flex 2. I don't have anything specific to build at the moment but I want to determine where I can fit it into future projects. The fact that ScrapBlog used it with much success really helped convince me that Flex is a great RIA platform.

Earlier in November, I commented on Sean Corfield's Blog about how I felt the both MM & Adobe had, to date, failed miserably in promoting ColdFusion as the application server of choice for web development. Sean replied with: "Rey, what would you like to see in terms of promotion? Give me some realistic, concrete examples of appropriate ColdFusion marketing..." Definitely a good question to which I offered lengthy feedback.

I knew this was coming down the pike and sure enough, I saw a posting today that outlines several other articles comparing Flex vs Ajax. TechPoint - Flex Vs Ajax - Which one is better and why? So which is better? Why? I think Flex is an awesome development tool for controlled environments such as corporate applications where hardware and operating system requirements are specifically defined whereas Ajax is the sure winner for Internet-based RIAs. Opinions? Enjoy.

Adobe's Mike Potter has posted a VERY cool example of how to use Flex & Ajax together to build Google Finance-like site. With all of the crap flying around about whether Flex is better than Ajax for RIA, its great to see Adobe take the lead and show a great example of integration between these two very important technologies. Check it out here: Mike Potter: AJAX & Flex Together.

I was reading an article on News.com about the declining costs of development tools when I came across this quote from Adobe's Jeff Whatcott: "In another example, Adobe Systems on Wednesday is expected to revamp the pricing for its Flex Flash development tools. The first version of its Flex tool set was about $15,000, but the price was throttling its adoption, said Jeff Whatcott, senior director of product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit.