Macromedia Flex - anyone using it, or have an opinion?

I've toyed with it. It's fantastic in concept but I don't like the proprietarty nature of the platform and can achieve most of the same results with ajax.

Thanks Craven.

Macromedia (now Adobe) are really leveraging their huge installed user base of flash readers to push other products to developers - have you seen flash paper? Small wonder Adobe bought them, it moves right into the simple PDF market, which Adobe have sort of ignored as they try and turn acrobat into a collaborative document authoring tool.

I've been building ASP/SQL apps for so long I was wondering what I should look at next (already learning PHP/MySQL). Liked the Flex idea of moving all the action to the client so that there isn't a lot of resubmitting to the server, so you get away from that model of interaction - but I also don't like relying on the client's capabilities.

Have read a little on AJAX, is there a front running authoring tool yet?

I haven't seen flash paper.

As to AJAX authoring tools, I haven't used any (I tend to go with js libraries like prototype) but don't really think any tool for ajax alone really exists. A lot of IDEs may have an add-on (like Microsoft's "Atlas") to automate a lot of form-based Ajax but I don't think any tool really exists out there to get very creative with it.

Well.. that actually brings me to your other question. The ideal platforms for you to learn depends on what you would do on them. For example, corporate web development enviroments are/willbe dominated by .NET and such.

If you are in the more grass-roots world of web development LAMP is obviously the way to go and I'd recommend mastering php/mysql instead of learning anything else. My web plans are all php/mysql rooted.

But if you want to explore and you like AJAX you may want to look at Ruby on Rails.