Yes, OpenLaszlo did come before FLEX, and Macromedia was certainly aware of it when they designed FLEX. The big difference between OpenLaszlo and FLEX is that O

Yes, OpenLaszlo did come before FLEX, and Macromedia was certainly aware of it when they designed FLEX. The big difference between OpenLaszlo and FLEX is that OpenLaszlo was designed from the start (2000-2001) to be independent of the delivery platform, and FLEX was designed from the start (2003-2004) to lock developers into Flash. OpenLaszlo was originally designed to be cross platform, first targeting Flash, then eventually other platforms like DHTML, which it now does. But FLEX is impossible to use with anything but Flash, by design. And now, predictably, people are complaining about being locked into Flash because they used FLEX, while Adobe is abandoning FLEX and Flash.