Also to bring water to this article, see

the very good application from La Banque Postale

, the french bank derived from La Poste, the still

post company (despite not working at all ;-):

https://www.particuliers.labanquepostale.fr/index/e-carte_bleue.html

Been using it for years, is extremely easy, uses SSL

to connect to the bank and generate the one use only

VISA number to pay online.

Will then show a picture of the VISA card with all

generated numbers on. Very neat.

And of course runs OK on Windows and Linux :-))

"Creating applications that work offline is a challenge."

That will be addressed in a matter of months when Adobe release 'apollo', which allows Flex and DHTML applications to run on the desktop, with on/off line notification, an upgrade framework and more.

"proprietary Flex Data Services"

Are now provided by several non-Adobe sources, such as Red5. May even be free.

You also left out remoteing calls to ColdFusion applications, which again is free and supported by several of the non-Adobe CFML engines. Again, these may be free.

Nice comment spam above, by the way.