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> Flash is a proprietary software app that uses
> proprietary protocols that are becoming ubiquitous on the internet.

But it's slowly opening up, and there are some good frameworks out there for it, like ActionStep. ActionStep is good enough to support building a desktop application. And MTASC is a great open source Flash compiler.

> Java vs typical web languages isn't the sort of fight
> Java minds on a performance front. Performance certainly
> isn't the thing that makes a servlet/jsp design suck.

Well said indeed. The bottleneck there is rarely the VM, it's the database queries or the network connections or disk I/O or something else. That's the strange thing about the "x doesn't scale" argument where x == Ruby|Python|Java - once you get a certain number of servers, the speed at which the language opcodes are being processed fades into the background.

> Find someone who switched from Java to flash for performance.
> It's got flexible networking and rendering that wipe the
> floor with flash.

I think Flash has an edge here in that there seem to be more people who know how to do whizzy graphics in Flash than in Java. I mean, my perception is that not many folks have done much working with the Java 2D API.

But Flash is starting to get some good frameworks for user interfaces - witness ActionStep. We're using it for indi and it's working out well.

> If you feel strongly enough about it, find another
> job where such issues are not likely to arise.

That's the crux of the matter. There are approximately one slew of jobs out there that won't be morally questionable, and you'll sleep better at night knowing that you're not enabling nasty behavior. It's a small victory but an important one.

Also, for Flash UI goodness, try ActionStep. It's an open source, BSD licensed UI framework for Flash. We use it in indi and it's good stuff.

You can put together an open source development toolkit for Flash development using the MTASC compiler. We use it for ActionStep development and it works great; it cut our compile time dramatically and can easily be used inside TextMate. Great stuff.

And for the language aficionados among you, MTASC itself is written in Ocaml. News for nerds...

> There's a ton of open source libraries out there

Right on, like ActionStep. We've built indi in it and it looks good, it's fast, and the API is continually improving. Good times.

> ActionScript has become o very powerful language

Right on, and with the addition of a good open source component framework, it's only getting better. MTASC + ActionStep == good times.

Check out as2lib It's the standard library you're looking for. Also, if you're looking for controls, check back with this in a few months.