Last night, the UK Coldfusion User Group hosted Ben Forta for a look at Macromedia's upcoming Flex product.

From what I saw, this looks like a potentially stunning product. An XML-based approach to designing interactive interfaces opens all sorts of capabilities up to people who have in the past avoided Flash due to its timeline and designery pretensions.

The full feature set of the product is still very hush-hush, but looking at some sample applications appearing on the Macromedia blogs, such as Christophe Coentrats' interactive blog reader in half a page of code, or Ben's own list/checkbox combo in a couple of lines, Macromedia look as if they are on the right track with this one.

With Microsoft barging into this space with Avalon, the Flash player is proving its value as a proper, grown-up UI. Assuming Macromedia can get Flex released and established soon, and with Avalon tied to the Longhorn release schedules, they should be on to a winner.