Adobe gives web designers more power with Flash Catalyst

Flex is bastardized ActionScript with a buttload of XML. They finally improved the language on version 3; AS3 is very powerful compared to AS2, but at the same time they bastardized it with "decorator" type stuff, non-code code that goes into your code that does stuff at compile time.

For example, the officially blessed way of attaching graphic assets to your applet is via XML directives that get expanded to magic at compile time.

This might not be a problem for everyone, but I hate languages that become so attached to their environment that you can't compile the, allegedly, portable source with another compiler: you need to process the "manifest", the dependency files, compile resources, and generally end up shoe-horning an IDE work-flow into your editor-based hacking.

I use Flex Builder 3 - the Flex platform is pretty elegant and although Flex Builder is not cutting edge, it fits in pretty nicely with the platform.

Just watched some clips on labs.adobe.com about Flash Builder 4 (next version of Flex Builder) and there are some nice improvements - they say it can run alongside FB 3 so I'm going to try that now. Excited about the new Flex 4 SDK.