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Free Flex 2 development tools from Adobe

Adobe Systems is using a tiered licensing strategy to get enterprise developers started on Flex 2 development of rich Internet apps. The free Flex 2 SDK, available this week, includes a framework and command line compiler.

The company is also offering the Flex Data Services 2 Express tool to developers for free, along with a single production license for deploying apps using message-based data-management services on a single CPU. The list pricing for Adobe Flex Data Services 2 is $20,000 per CPU plus maintenance and support.

These Eclipse-based tools can be used in any Eclipse IDE, including Adobe’s Flex Builder 2, available for $499 estimated street price, $749 with Charting. More information on Flex 2 and the free tools are available on the Web site.

Adobe also announced an upgrade to its Flash Player 8.5 technology this week. Re-architected, Flash Player 9 is a client runtime environment for Flex development. The new release speeds up development 10-fold, according to the company, through object-oriented programming language ActionScript 3.0, which features the new ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM2. Flash Player 9 is available for download now.