yeah. there’s a lot of discussion about it. makes flash more like a
coding a server-side app and less of the traditional flash paradigm of
deeply co-mingled graphics and code. for this reason, server-side guys
tend to accept flex without blinking, while old-school flashs experts
tend to pooh-pooh it — it’s much more grid oriented and i *think*
(not sure), that the files tend to be much larger than hand-optimized
flash, because Flex imports lots of adobe’s layout toolkit code so you
don’t have to roll your own.

from as1 to as 2 to as3, adobe has made AS more and more like Java
(classpath, strong typing, IDE approach, elaborately huge libraries),
and Flex is IMHO adobe’s play for a piece of the application dev space
– would compete with say dot net, but tries to leverage flash’s
ten-year old creative web development community.