In late June Adobe officially launched Flex 2 which is their flagship rich internet client framework and IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Flex was designed to handle RIA's (Rich Internet Applications) that are data-intensive and Adobe claims Flex 2 improves performance, pulling down as many as 20,000 records in a few hundred milliseconds.

And, like nearly every product out today that has anything to do with building Web applications, Flex is based on the Eclipse development platform. The IDE itself will sell for $499 for the basic edition, and $749 for a deluxe version that includes charting. Additionally, the enterprise version of Flex Data Services, which supports multi-CPU or clustered environments, will sell for $20,000 per server. And, we're talking US Dollars here.

So ... what's in it for the developer? Adobe Flex 2.0 utilises Flash, MXML (Macromedia XML ... hey, shouldn't that be AXML!), ActionScript 3.0, Ajax Runtime (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and more ... With Flex, developers can create Flash based applications with a wide variety of features that are designed to run in the revamped Flash Player 9 virtual machine. Flex 2 now supports internet independent applications as well, which would be great for offline applications that only need to connect to the internet occasionally.

Developers and the curious can visit the Adobe website for an indepth look at getting started with Flex 2, which delves into ActionScript 3.0, MXML and creating your first Flex 2 application.

Anyone who is interested in viewing some sample Flex 2 applications online, you can visit the samples page on the Adobe Website.

Developers will also benefit from the Flex 2 developer's community housed on the Adobe website. As usual, when purchasing an Adobe product, you are not alone, there are forums, examples and downloads galore.

The word around the net is that Adobe have got it right this time with Flex. Like Cake PHP, developer's are embracing Flex and the future of RIA's on the Internet looks so bright we might have to wear shades.