Flex 2 Beta announced

1 02 2006

Flex 2 Beta will be available from the labs.adobe.com site very soon and as you’ve probably heard by now an important licensing change was announced. The Flex 2 SDK, framework and compiler will be *free of charge* — (with the Eclipse based Flex Builder 2 priced at under 1,000 USD).

Looking at this as a Flash and Flex enthousiast I can only applaud the move, it will open up the market to those that have dismissed the software before because of its price tag and the fact that it was a server. Now anyone can compile Flex projects, integrate the command line compiler with their favorite editor and deploy the compiled SWFs for free. If the free compiler is the same one used in Flex Builder 2 this also means that AS3 will be supported.

Great news if you’re into open source Flash development and heard that there are no immediate plans to support AS3 with MTASC. Very happy to see the way Adobe is handling the Flash platform and look forward to seeing much more Flex applications pop up in the coming months.

Be sure to download the Flex 2 beta when it hits labs in the coming hours and also check out the videos on labs to get you started:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flexbuilder2/tutorials/

[update] Looks like we’ll be gettin a free version of Flex Enterprise Services as well, all be it limited in the number of concurrent users. This is huge, never expected them to open up that up to the average developer. Good move guys!