Bruce Eckel - Hybridizing Java:

"It’s not impossible to build GUI applications with Java, but it’s been 10 years and there are still installation hiccups with applets, Java WebStart, and regular applications. After 10 years, people don’t trust it anymore. If it’s not there after 10 years, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that someone doesn’t consider this problem important enough to fix. And even if they did, there have been so many bad experiences among consumers that it would take years to get the trust back.

[...] Allow for a moment the possibility that, after 10 years, Java is not going to take over the world of RIAs. Further allow that Ajax is just “how JavaScript was supposed to work in the first place,” but that the limitations imposed by browsers, HTML and CSS committees seem unlikely to let it expand beyond its current bounds. What are we going to use to build RIAs?

[...] One of the most appealing things about Flex is that Flash was created with the idea of UI first. In a very real sense, it’s a domain-specific language (DSL) for graphics, multimedia, and UIs, whereas most other solutions have been languages with UI libraries tacked on afterwards. Because of this design goal, Flex and Flash provide a complete, unlimited, flexible tool to build user experiences."