Analysts concurred that AJAX, Flex and Flash can coexist. "The reality is AJAX technology does a subset of what Flash does and with the tools provided by Adobe, you can use whatever combination of AJAX or Flash [you prefer] as a runtime," said analyst Mike Gilpin, vice president and research director at Forrester Research.

Flex, Gilpin said, provides an enterprise solution for developing applications in the context of SOA, with clients using services provided by a back-end system,

Adobe believes it is offering the most technically elegant, sophisticated and most complete way to develop rich Internet applications.

Also being unveiled in conjunction with Flex 2 is an improved Flash runtime, Flash Player 9. "In some cases, we have seen performance go as much as 10 times faster," Whatcott said.

Performance is improved through a new version of the ActionScript virtual machine, which is where applications are run. ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript Edition 4 specification, which provides the basis for JavaScript.