Yakov Fain asks Should Java Developers Care About Flex?

Basically, this question could be re-phrased like this “Should I invest my time in learning this technology, are there any real (billable) projects going on in Flex?”, or like this: “I am a Java developer, and do not have too much time in my hands - do you recommend me learning Flex”…

We are using Flex, for a commercial product to be delivered later this year.  It will be B2B, it will run inside a browser, and it will be awesome.

The comments on this article are very amusing - Flash? How gauche! - the kind of elitist distaste that used to permeate the C++ crowd in 1995 when someone mentioned “java”

If I have the opportunity to choose between writing a front-end in Flex or HTML/JSP/JavaScript, I’ll generally prefer Flex.  It looks very nice, all of the animation and rich interactions are built-in (not assembled from a frankensteinian mess of JavaScript libraries), the language is generally compatible with JavaScript, which makes learning it easier, and it doesn’t have any cross-browser issues as far as I’m aware.

My favorite computer game of all time is Rome Total War, and I must announce to the world that I have uninstalled Medieval II after just a couple of weeks. It is a fine game, but it crashes constantly, and the support forums basically consist of well-meaning unpaid volunteers saying “It’s your hardware, or you have a conflict with another game.”
Well, I installed it on a brand new MacBook Pro (in Windows), with no other games at all installed. It’s hard to imagine a more clean, stable environment for a game, and it has been terribly frustrating to find M2TW so very fragile.

Update - I’ve had two commenters say “Get a new PC.”  I have a brand new MacBook Pro, Core2Duo 2.16 GHz machine, that runs other games beautifully.    If that’s not enough to play this game well, then the developers are fools.