AJAX’s rise to stardom has caused IT managers, software architects, and developers to give due consideration to enhancing richness and interactivity in web applications. AJAX and its adoption by major web players gave us hope for desktop like responsiveness on the web. Although AJAX is certainly the culprit behind most of the hype, it’s certainly not the only game in town.

In this session, Jim presents the Flash Platform as a viable option for delivering enterprise grade web applications. Adobe Flex 1.5, Flex 2.0, Flex Data Services, Flash Remoting, and Flash Media Server are discussed as essential components to delivering rich media enabled, stateful clients. Specifically, this session investigates solutions that would be prohibitive or impossible using AJAX technologies alone, and illustrates from a business and technology perspective how the Flash Platform delivers. The primary focus will be in corporate communications, web collaboration, content management, and presence management. Additionally, open source efforts for the Flash Platform as well as best practices for adopting Flash into your development workflow will be covered.