Macromedia Flex(ing)

macromedia has had a j2ee server jrun and some other java products. i was always expecting them to use flash as a frontend for j2ee apps (it was possible before but a little complicated). but this is purely revoltionary. flex sounds great but adoption by the community is important. it can be plugged into any application server. i hope to see the programming style soon.
fistly the j2ee api is in major flux. jsp the dynamic web pages in java do not have proper separation between code and ui. this led to a seperate ui package struts by jakarta,apache. currently jsf (java server faces) are being developed as an alternate ui which can be used in conjunction with jsp's for proper mvc architecture based apps. but jsf has not been released as a final version. i guess winforms performs a similar function ( is it for web ui also?) in .net. this is one reason why there are some major problems with the j2ee web tier right now. you can build great apps but it is messy. basically struts and jsf provide the prog. with java style programming and do add some javascript in the background. but the prog sees no intermingled code.
i am not sure about rich internet applications (ria). are ria for a better web experience only based on browsers? and i read that microsoft might even remove the browser in favour of other thick clients.( http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/648 )
between html/css/java script and flash, flash would win because it can provide more "rich" controls. how much ever you tweak javascript etc i doubt how rich controls you can get. on the other hand flash was built for this. also how widespread is dhtml. i guess ms went out of its way with ie and dhtml, and not mozilla etc.
so as a prospective developer i have no idea where the future is. how rich controls does a client want is the question. does he want to get out of the browser to a thick client? suprisingly i think java is winning this race. you have flex, and sun packages a thick client with the default sdk download.( http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart/ ) another interesting view is that the future is peer 2 peer. here jxta has some headway.( http://jxta.org ) please compare any similar .net projects.
a java desktop is going to be released sometime. basically suse linux with a lot of sun apps like staroffice and lots of java integration. and its not free!!
so i guess ms is in for a good fight... who'll win lets see..
for the moment lets hope that we get time to learn atleast one api...