I used to work on the development team at Springbox before moving over to the Rich Media team and working in Adobe Flash. Now that I’ve been introduced to Flex, I see that many of the projects going to the development department could just as easily go to the Rich Media team, possibly even saving time and money for the client while providing a better user experience.

Here are my top 5 reasons to choose Flex for building large data-driven web applications:

1.    Faster development time. When it comes to rapid prototype development, Flex is the perfect choice. Flex has a set of components to easily and quickly build an interface for loading and manipulating data. It can be very useful to test out UI controls and overall layout, as well as verifying data retrieval.      
2.    Faster data retrieval. James Ward created a benchmark-testing tool to show the benchmarks for data loading between different frameworks. Flex AMF3 leads in faster loading times. Try it out yourself!
3.    Richer user experience. With Flex you get all the added benefits of Flash. This is important to remember. Any rich UI design elements, animations, video and audio playback, all come with Flash and therefore come with Flex.
4.    Portability. Let’s say you want to take a Flex application you serve over the web and build an AIR application that users can install on their system. This is a quick and simple process and requires little change to the code.
5.    Open source. Beat that! Flex is open source. This allows a community to get involved in making Flex better for everyone. With a community of Adobe users as large as it is, you don’t need to worry about the framework becoming a tool of the past.