But it all sucked big time because what we all wanted, was to run those apps in the browser and on the desktop. Adobe Flex was the first real thing that came close: you could have loaded a swf file into an air wrapper. But Flash is dead, Flex is dead. And now we have what we have. It could have been worse.

Frankly, Flex did s lot of things right. The layout and the default widget library was top notch. The grid was a killer feature. The IDE was really helpful.