We are using Flex for www.rocksolidarcade.com. It's the Adobe comand line compiler that outputs Flash files. Actionscript 3.0 is basically Javascript 2.0. You c

We are using Flex for www.rocksolidarcade.com. It's the Adobe comand line compiler that outputs Flash files. Actionscript 3.0 is basically Javascript 2.0. You code it very much like a traditional application (or Java plugin), with any IDE and a command line compiler. The Flex SDK is free, but they've got an IDE based on Eclipse that is just too cool not to use, at least when 3.0 comes out of beta. That's about $500 I think, but the profiler is probably worth that alone (if you have funding). Alternatively, FlashDevelop is very good. And frankly, even if Flex was $1000, the Adobe Flex IDE didn't exist, and the Flash IDE was free, I'd be using Flex. The Flash IDE for any kind of serious development is just horrible. Hosting is a bit of a moot point - yes, you can get a Flash comm server from Adobe, but that's just an option, and an option you don't have with Java (though I know very little about the Flash comm server, you can do raw TCP in flash, so writing your own is definitely possible).