I have wondered for some time about why Flash never really caught on with its concept of Rich Media Applications. After all, it provided an application-like interface built around ActionScript (an OO JavaScript-esque language) with XML pipes long before AJAX became popular. However, the answer appeared to be right in front of me - there are less Flash developers out there than there are JavaScript developers. So has AJAX “won”? Time will tell as an elegant solution for web application development, but it certainly looks like the best option we have today.

It also helped by reading this article from which the above table (showing other alternatives) was snaffled.