StockFetcher is a website that helps people pick stocks, with a ton of information relating to any company's financial activities. It goes beyond what's available at a Google Finance or Yahoo Finance website with detailed, and I mean detailed, information about company stocks.

Their StockFetcher 2.0 application is a Flex based application that allows you to drill down into stock information for a company, including an absolute ton of graphs. Yes, with this application you do measure graphs in weight :-) . You can create your own filters, change the date range using a cool Flex slider component, similar to how you change the date range on Google Finance, customize the charts and more.

StockFetcher monetizes their application through subscriptions. Standard subscriptions are $8.95 per month or $24.95 per quarter, and Advanced subscriptions are $16.95 per month or $44.95 per quarter. The differences between the two plans are numerous, including the number of saved filters, advanced filtering and more.

Flex is great for this application because of the built in charting capabilities, and the performance that you get from compiled code. There's so much information on these charts that Flex breezes through because of the new virtual machine in Flash Player 9.

Many people are confused about the relationship between Flash, Flex and Ajax. Its a bit tricky, because in many cases the three technologies are similar to each other: all three allow web developers to add dynamic elements to static webpages very easily. Flex and Flash are both delivered via the Flash Player (normally used as a plugin to browsers), Ajax applications are delivered via the browser. Ajax is written with JavaScript, XML and HTML components, Flex applications are written with ActionScript, XML and MXML components.

I think that because of these similarities, many people often assume that you'll build your site using Ajax OR Flex OR Flash. The truth is, that's just not the case. There are a number of great examples of sites that are using Flash and Ajax together. Today I'm highlighting two of them: Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.