Why Flex and not Ajax

Some time ago, my CTO asked me a question: "Why do we develop GUI using Adobe Flex and not some Ajax toolkit ?".


Following is list of reasons I compiled, maybe someone will find it helpful when being asked the same question:

1. Its a technology we have more than 3 years of development and design expierence with.

2. Established community and plenty of forums are available.

3. Cross browser, cross OS.

4. Eye candy with almost no effort.

5. Can be executed as a desktop application (AIR).

6. Very good client-server interaction . (Blaze DS, Granite DS)

7. Solid development tools - Flex Builder, Intellij.

8. Good object oriented development language. (actionscript)

9. Very good debuging and profiling tools which is very important in GUI development.

10. Flex's graphs and reports framework.

11. Very good webservices toolkit.

12. Media streaming capabilities (Red5).