I have been working with the Flex software a bit, keeping up with the Flex listserv and discussion boards at MM. One thing that I have found interesting is that all the questions and discussions revolve around Java and coding issues. There is no design discussions at all. I am curious if it's because the attitude is that designers are no longer needed because the Halo guidlines will "automagically" provide a great user experience, or is it because the design community has yet to become involved with these tools.

One thing that struck me as I was learning MXML was just how much it removes the need for skills in the traditional client side technologies such as HTML, DHTML and Javascript. At the last company I worked at I was the client side developer for a J2EE based application. One of the main reasons I was there was for the simple reason that none of the Java coders wanted to deal with client-side issues. They also were not designers and counted on me being able to design better interfaces than they could, but I could easily see if they were using Flex and could create nice UIs programmatically that they would see my skills as being marginalized.

I guess the big question for me is where do traditional client side coders and designers fit into this new world of XML based scripting languages? I can see a few scenarios:

1) we become more involved in requirements and use cases
2) learn more java and learn how to extend the Flex/Laszlo APIs

Any other ideas? Or am I totally off base here?