Flex vs HTML vs Time

The old simple triangle of time vs features vs quality has reared it's ugly head again. After one particularly unproductive weekend I've made the decision to place a hold on the Flex interface for XChain, in favour of a raw HTML interface, sprinkled with AJAX. I personally hate the decision, being enamored with Flex, I don't want to make it, but I look at the forward progress I've made in the past couple of weeks and it's been more or less stationary. I'm not trying to deliver the 'richest' interface possible, I'm going to deliver a working application. What impacts my client most, is that they can get their job done. Granted I am learning Flex, and grappling with the Cairngorm/No Cairngorm decision. I decided to go ahead with Cairngorm, particularly after reading the usual tales of woe 'i decided not to use it, now I've rebuild my app and am using it..'. However holy sh-t do you have to produce a lot of code to get things done, okay there are code generators out there, but still. For a pet project this blows out the window the time required to do the job. Sure if this was a 40hr work week project I'd be writing a completely different post right now. This makes me appreciate the elegant nature of Ruby and Rails™ so much more. It just gets out of your way and lets you get on with producing productive code. In just one hour I can do so much more. Firing up textmate I feel instantly at home. Is this a language familiarity thing, or a complexity problem, or am I using the right tool for the right job, within the given constraints, (probably not). I had a big discussion about it with a colleague at work, and it always boils down to trade-offs and compromises, there's no one magic silver bullet (unfortunately). Rails is fantastic at backend work, and helps some with front end work, Flex has some great time savers, rich interface components like datagrid which are cake to wire up and get working - but then you're spending a tonne of time on event and ui management. Where is the happy median ? Something like a super rich js framework ? What am I sorely missing from flex in going 'back' to HTML ? - Rich components - Consistent styling - Reduced network traffic A random thought floating through my mind is to publish it in AIR, that way I can still use an HTML interface hooked up to my back end, but a few extra features that might be very useful (drag n drop support, offline storage). More to investigate.. Grumpy but moving forward.