Looking to increase adoption of its Flex rich Internet application development technology, Adobe Systems is releasing its Flex 2 product line on Wednesday, which features free versions and the ability to push data to clients.
With Flex 2, enterprises would only begin paying as they scale up their applications. "We think this really changes the game significantly in the rich Internet application space," said Jeff Whatcott, Adobe senior director of product marketing.
While the new, tiered pricing strategy might be construed as a response to the ubiquitous AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technique for Web development, Whatcott denied that this was the intent. But the company's pricing plan seems likely to make Flex either a more popular alternative to or more of a companion to AJAX.
With Flex 2, the company seeks to remove barriers to adoption. The Flex 2 software development kit is free; previous versions had been bundled with the $15,000-per-CPU Flex Presentation Server 1.5.
With the new SDK, developers can build and deploy applications with no server component needed for lower level applications. "This gives developers a tremendous way to start building Flex applications without a lot of investment," Whatcott said. Currently, about 5,000 developers use Flex but Adobe wants the former Macromedia technology to grow to 1 million developers in five years.
With Flex 2, XML and Web services can be used for connecting to a server when data is accessed infrequently and payloads are small. For more advanced applications, Adobe is offering its Flex Data Services 2 Express software for linking between data and the presentation layer. The Express version gives developers the ability to deploy to single-CPU systems for free.
If an application is clustered across multiple CPUs, Flex Data Services licensing starts at $20,000 per CPU. Flex Data Services is the renamed Flex Presentation Server plus additional capabilities for data management and messaging.
Adobe's pricing moves make Flex 2 more competitive with AJAX, which has enjoyed the economical status that comes with primarily being open source, said Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst at the Burton Group. "I don't think Adobe had much of a choice if they wanted to remain competitive," Monson-Haefel said.
Flex Data Services 2 can push data from the server to the client. Server-side intelligence can extract data from SAP, for example, and send it to the client. Flex Presentation Server capabilities now are embedded within Flex Data Services.
Adobe's push technology was cited as a highlight of Flex 2 by beta user Jeff Maling, president of Roundarch, which does consulting and development for clients such as Citigroup and the U.S. Air Force. The feature improves efficiency by eliminating the need for polling between the client and server, Maling said.
"Really, for the first [time] in any enterprise fashion, Flex is able to push data to the [Web client]," Maling said.
"In general, [Flex 2] fixes many of the current issues with the Web," by providing capabilities such as the pushing of data, said Maling.
Flex features all the bells and whistles of contemporary rich Internet application development, according to Adobe. "You have rich media such as audio and video [that] can be incorporated into the apps and you also have collaborative data exchange," Whatcott said.
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