Flex/Flash Platform + Zorn?

Mike Chambers is a (according to his blog) "Flash Platform Developer Relations at Macromedia" - person. He posted the following today,

A couple of days ago I made a post asking everyone what features they would like to see in Zorn (Zorn is the code name for a next-generation rich Internet application IDE based on Eclipse that we are currently working on). As expected, we got a ton of great input, and lots of cool feature ideas (many of which are already planned). Anyway, there is one question that kept coming up, which I wanted to quickly address in order to help everyone better understand the significance of Zorn.

The question that kept coming up, was whether Zorn would be able to compile apps / SWFs without requiring a server to deploy. Well, everyone who asked this (and probably a few others) should be happy to find out that you will be able to use Zorn to develop and deploy applications based on MXML, ActionScript and the next generation of the Flex framework (all without requiring a server). We will be updating the Zorn FAQ later today to make this clearer.

(Zorn FAQ link.)

I haven't mentioned Flex on my blog, but for the un-informed it is a product similiar to OpenLaszlo, made by Macromedia (who makes the Flash Player). I haven't programmed anything in Flex, but from what I've heard the programming model is easier to work with than OpenLaszlo. (AGAIN - I haven't worked with Flex, this is what a couple of people who have told me.) If there is one thing I know for sure about Flex is that their components are at least 100X prettier than the equivalent OpenLaszlo components. ;)

I really wish this Zorn product was out, like yesterday. I'd like to be able to compare it's capabilities to that of the server-less deployement option of OpenLaszlo. It sounds like Zorn will only support certain featurs of Flex - they're probably going to keep the native ActionScrip/Java databinding-thing-a-gig for the Flex server product.

I'm going pretty ga-ga over this whole "Rich Internet Application" thing. I've chosen to develop my web-based Project Management tool in OpenLaszlo. If any of you find this stuff interesting check out these links:

Macromedia Flash Platform
Macromedia Flex (XML + ActionScript = Flash Application)
OpenLaszlo (XML + JavaScript = Flash Application. And it's open source!)