Coghead took a giant step toward taking Web 2.0 application development mainstream with the announcement today of Coghead version 2.0 which will use Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud) hosting service and incorporate the Adobe Flex development environment into its infrastructure.

The target market for Coghead's 100 percent Web-based development environment are knowledge workers, rather than programmers, and the 50 million businesses that don't have a server, said Paul McNamara, Coghead CEO.

Using Flex will give those knowledge workers a bigger library of widgets to use in order to create forms and at the same time enlarge the community of developers who can write applications using Coghead.

"We are trying to expand the range of people who can create business applications from simple applications created by moderately technical people all the way up to professional programmers," said McNamara.

Version 2.0 is three times faster than the original version released in April 2007, according to McNamara, thanks mainly to performance enhancements using Adobe Flex.

"The Flex packet size is compact and efficient between server and desktop," said McNamara.

The other major highlight of version 2.0 is the deal with Amazon to use its EC2 hosting environment, which will give users assurance that their data and application definitions are safely stored in the Amazon cloud.

In addition, McNamara said that creating Web services on Amazon's platform has always be a daunting task, and by putting Coghead on top of EC2, Amazon will also extend its market to less technical developers.

In coming news, Coghead is also working to adopt Adobe AIR, formerly code named Apollo, onto its platform. AIR gives users the ability to work with Web 2.0 applications offline and will cut down on the initial load of an application.

Coghead Version 2.0 is available now.