Do all Rich Internet Applications technologies suck?

On the Scala mailing list the other day, David Pollak and I talked a little bit about these XML-based, Flash-targetting “Rich Internet Application” markup languages that are out now, like Adobe Flex, OpenLaszlo (what a lousy name for a product), etc. David is cooking up stuff to use this stuff in his upcoming framework Mondo from what I hear.

Here is my opinion of these thus far:

1. They are usually ugly. Especially OpenLaszlo. Because it appears the people who work on this stuff have no taste, probably it will mangle and maim type even worse than usual on the Internet.
2. They are either impossible to make usable or default to highly unusable behavior the way Flash used to. There are many things wrong but, consider the most egregious problems, such as apparently non-resizable type and non-standard scrollbars.
3. They take too long to load (maybe this is a special case of (2)), some of them bringing my computer to its knees. Ridiculous.

Now Adobe’s upcoming Apollo project seems to rectify (1). But that appears to default to unusably small type as well. Here is a little video demo of some apps one of the Adobe people has cooked up with Apollo internally.

I conclude from this that all this RIA stuff basically sucks, and we’ll be stuck with <textarea> for a while yet.