At this morning's keynote, Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Technology at IBM gave a ringing endorsement for Macromedia's new Flex technology. His two main points:

1. J2EE is a great platform for middleware, but falls short on the client/presentation layer. 2. Flex represents a platform agnostic (meaning supported by J2EE/ColdFusion and .Net) solution for the presentation layer that appeals to traditional code based developers.

One other interesting point that I think Rod made (actually it was just on a slide) was the use of Flex with enterprise portals. I've been doing a lot of research/work with portals lately, and I think it would be really interesting to see how Flex would/could be used within the Portlet framework specified in JSR 168 and JSR 170. I'm hoping that IBM and Macromedia will have more to say on this topic soon.