Adobe Systems has announced the public beta of Adobe Flex 2.0 product line and Adobe Flash Player 8.5, an application development solution designed to deliver rich Internet applications.

Developers everywhere now will be able to build next generation Web experiences that help organizations engage users more effectively, increase productivity, and deliver better business results, the company says.

"Over the last 10 years we have used many technologies to build rich Internet applications for our clients, including DHTML-based and Ajax techniques, but we always found ourselves having to sacrifice either developer productivity or the richness of the user experience," says Dave Wolf, vice-president at Cynergy Systems.

"With Flex 2.0 and Flash Player 8.5, we can finally deliver the kinds of rich applications our clients demand without compromise. That is Web 2.0!"

The Flex 2.0 product line aims to provide developers with an extensible application framework, intuitive programming model, standards-based data integration, and an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for application development and UI design.

With an extensive component library, advanced data integration, and support for standard back-end server infrastructures, Flex 2.0 is designed to enable developers to build virtually any type of rich Internet application, from simple interactive sites, to rich data dashboards and portals, to data-intensive enterprise applications.

"Adobe is committed to delivering the tools and servers that application developers need to deliver engaging rich Internet applications, from interactive product configurators to mission-critical business applications," says David Mendels, senior vice-president, Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe.

"The response to the public alpha release of the Flex 2.0 product line has been tremendous, and we cannot wait to see what developers will do with the new capabilities found in this release."

The following components are said to be part of the Flex beta program:

-- Flash Player 8.5 -- a high-performance client runtime for engaging Web experiences;

-- Flex Framework 2.0 -- the core programming model and component library for Flex;

-- Flex Builder 2.0 -- an Eclipse-based IDE for developing Internet applications with the Flex Framework;

-- Flex Enterprise Services 2.0 -- essential data services and an open adapter architecture for delivering data-intensive rich Internet applications and deeply integrating with enterprise service-oriented infrastructure;

-- Flex Charting Components 2.0 -- extensible components for advanced data visualization.