OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations

dragonchild has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am currently the sole developer for both Kayuda Maps and Kayuda Mindmaps. They're applications built with a ton of AJAX JS/CSS (about 20K lines) on top of a very tight Catalyst/DBIC server (about 3K lines). They share about 80% of basic functionality, but because of the huge dependence on CSS that an AJAX application requires, I had to fork the codebases so that I could actually get work done instead of fiddle with CSS and JS management.

I've gotten my boss to agree to a rewrite of the front-end in any technology I deem appropriate. It can be JS/CSS/AJAX or anything else. The criteria I've been given are:

Cross-platform - Must support Win32 and OSX (1/6 of all laptops sold last quarter were Apples.)
Supports proper coding practices (CSS sucks with this - I'm almost ready to build a metalanguage for managing CSS)
Supports rapid development - I have about 6 weeks to do the rewrite in whatever technology I choose. So, prior art, libraries, and the like are a big plus.
Shouldn't require any additional downloads beyond what's already in IE7 or FF2 (or Win32/OSX).
Goes without saying, but supporting an HTTP REST API is kinda key.

So far, the list of technologies I've got are:

AJAX - browsers are ubiquitous.
Flash - both IE7 and FF1+ have it embedded.
Java applets - as far as I know, IE5 and FF0.x have supported this out of the box. (Is IE7 is restricting applets?)
Writing my own client in <whatever>.

Technologies I've rejected:

ActiveX - Once IE5 for OSX was discontinued, there's no ActiveX interpreter on OSX.

Right now, I'm leaning very heavily towards Flash. I've talked to a few people and they're saying that Flash8 is where it's at. It's fast, supported by IE7 and FF2, supports good programming practices, and has a good set of libraries to work with. Is there something better?

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Comment on OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations

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Re: OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations by Fletch (Bishop) on Sep 13, 2007 at 16:30 UTC
This may be what you mean when you're talking Flash, but . . . If you can accept Flash 9, Flex is pretty interesting. The base SDK environment is available free (in the beer sense; or there's an IDE for ~$500). In about a week+ I was able to cargo cult together something using the (for pay) charting components with some marginally complex behavior. If you've got familiarity with a GUI toolkit and JavaScript knowledge you should be able to pick up MXML and ActionScript pretty easily.	[reply]
Re^2: OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Sep 13, 2007 at 16:32 UTC
Given that we've already excluded IE6 due to JS issues, if Flex gets me what I need, then I can put in a Flash9-only restriction. My criteria for good software: Does it work? Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?	[reply]
Re: OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations by andyford (Curate) on Sep 14, 2007 at 19:41 UTC
As far as I can tell, java applets have been a colossal failure. I like Flash for single purpose things like media players, but for a whole site, Flash is too closed and limiting and takes too much power out of the user's hands. AJAX is the long term answer. non-Perl: Andy Ford	[reply]
Re: OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations by princepawn (Parson) on Sep 14, 2007 at 14:09 UTC
I am thoroughly impressed with any and every thing the German Cosmos Coders group does. And the thing they do that is right up your alley is haXe Carter's compass: I know I'm on the right track when by deleting something, I'm adding functionality	[reply]
Re: OT: Seeking clientside technology recommendations by perrin (Chancellor) on Sep 14, 2007 at 19:49 UTC
My impression is that while Ajax is attractive in that it seems more integrated, it's also probably more work than Flash if you're doing anything significant. The cross-browser issues are very significant, and the whole thing is a real time-drain. I dislike Flash more than most people, but if you're going to make a site that depends on doing fancy UI and you don't have much time to build it, Flash seems like a wiser choice.	[reply]
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