Well so much for Flex! I've now spent three or four days looking at it, reading about it, finding my way around the publicly available resources, and I don't like it.
I've had a simple form ready for hooking up for the last three days, and for the last three days it's had the same two problems: controls that were perfectly well aligned before I put them in an accordion or in a tab set become badly aligned when I put them in one, and Flex's HTTPService (their version of an XMLHttpRequest) seems unable to provide credentials to a url protected by basic authentication, even though it has a setCredentials(userid, password) function that looks as though it is supposed to do just that (but rumour has it that it only works when talking to Adobe's own LiveCycle data services).
So that's just not good enough. I can only conclude that people using Flex, who presumably care about things like form layout if they are using a tool that maxes teh pretty, are willing to spend inordinate amounts of time aligning child controls by hand in code (or by setting the parent's layout to Absolute and then moving the children around in the IDE, which amounts to the same thing), and that their RIAs are busily communicating with unsecured web services on the server - or that they've given up trying to make secured communication work on their own, and have stumped up the money for LiveCycle.
Honestly, Java can do that sort of stuff in its sleep. If only it didn't look so bad! Oh well, I'm still not going to go the applet route (hear that, Sun?) so it's back to making the YUI tabs work with my crappy html content, by loading their content via an xmlhttprequest after the page has loaded, rather than by including their content with the page, which somehow buggers the tabbing up.
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