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So what is Flex used for and who's using it? Flex is an enterprise product, it's strengths are the ability to easily build a robust rich user experiences for enterprise solutions. Applications like:

• Configurators
• Product selectors, shopping carts
• Presenting large amounts of information graphically
• Dashboards
• Business process automation, large multipart forms
• Highly visual applications, charting, image manipulation

SAP have licensed Flex and are using it to extend SAP NetWeaver allowing developers and organizations to build rich interfaces to SAP solutions in sorter amounts of time.

Who's using Flex? There are a number of Flex applications currently in development here in Australia, one of which when it launches later this year will be the largest Flex application ever.

Overseas, Flex is being used by:

• BSkyB
• Cisco Systems
• Dow Jones
• MasterCard
• Mercedes-Benz
• Kodak - Ofoto
• Pfizer
• Walt Disney

Having been personally involved with a number of large Flex projects I guess it could be said that my glasses are, like Bono, a little on the rosy side. Let's play the pessimist for a couple of minutes and have a look at the negatives.

Sticker shock would be a fair comment for the price of the Flex 1.5 server, and I'm sure that a number of Flex projects haven't managed to get off the ground because of that alone. The productivity gain from developing Flash applications with a markup language compared to building the UI by hand is enough to probably justify the price of the server on a large RIA.

Flex is currently limited to the browser, it's supported by Flash Player 7 and while the recent release of Flash Lite 2 for compatible mobile phones means a Flash 7 compatible player for mobiles, Flex applications are not currently supported. That doesn't mean that they never will, Adobe recently advertised the job "Senior Product Manager, Flex Mobile Development at Adobe", so I'd expect something to happen with Flex and mobiles soon enough.

The other thing is that you would use Flex to power something simple like a Flash feedback form when you could built it in a reasonable amount of time from scratch. Having said that there's exciting news about the cost of the soon to be released Flex 2.

The really big news that developers should be excited about is the pending release of Flex 2. The next version of Flex brings radical change in features, licensing, authoring environment and pricing. I personally believe that Flex 2 is going to bring about the biggest change in the way we build things for the web.

The big news about Flex 2 is that Flex 2 is free -- it will free to develop, free to compile and free to deploy a Flex 2 application. How about that Mr AJAX.

To clarify my previous paragraph:

• While the Flex Builder 2 IDE will retail for around USD $1000, you would be able to author your Flex 2 application in MXML and ActionScript with any text editor of your choice, the advantage of having Flex Builder 2 is greater insight into the tags as well as WYSIWYG layout.
• With Flex 2 Adobe will release a Flex compiler as part of the free Flex Framework SDK that you'll be able to produce SWFs with that can be deployed anywhere you like, no licensing strings attached. Applications that you build with Flex 2 will not need a Flex server or J2EE server for deployment.
• Applications built and compiled with the free compiler will be able to connect to web services and ColdFusion so that they can be data driven RIAs.
• The new version of what was Flex presentation server will be renamed Flex Data Services. If you want to have access to remote objects like Java objects, implicit paging of large data sets, history management, collaboration and data synchronisation you'll need to purchase Flex Data Services.
• Flex 2 will use a new version of ActionScript, version 3 which will introduce new language features.
• Flex 2 applications will need to run in a new version of the Flash Player which is currently in public beta, Flash Player 9.

Flex 2 has been available for download to developers right from alpha from Adobe Labs, it's currently beta 2. Release of the final product is expected to be around June this year. By the amount of talk currently being generated about Flex 2 on the major Flex mailing list, FlexCoders, I'd suggest that you should download the beta of Flex 2 now and try it out for yourself, because it's going to become a popular RIA development tool once the final version is released.

If you're looking for more information on Flex there's a few places to visit online. There's only one Flex mailing list, FlexCoders, it's run by the creators of Cairngorm. Adobe have a Flex developer centre for tutorials, articles and code examples. To get more information on Flex 2 and to download the latest beta visit Adobe Labs.

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