Flash: what is it good for?

Flash: what is it good for?

After revisiting the Adobe site in light of the Flex beta I was forced to reconsider the pros and cons of Flash versus AJAX.

At this stage though I've little practical experience with Flash in the last two years (something I want to change) so I'm looking to someone else to provide some insight on when it's best to use AJAX and when to use Flash.

I also want to look at Flex, it's interesting how development tools are offering more complex interface widgets for RIAs and I wonder if/when I'll move from coding XHTML and CSS into working in more rich interface application tools.

I like controlling my code and understanding how it works, but as long as the code produced is of a good quality I feel no need to hand scribe everything. Generally the problem with such automated tools is the code is much heavier than required. If you need an example of that look at the still awful Macromedia implementation of rollovers in Dreamweaver.