Adobe Flex is an amazing development in online applications. In a nutshell, Flex brings the power of a desktop application to your browser. I know everyone’s claiming that these days, but this looks really promising.

Flex was originally released in October of 2005 by Macromedia to augment Macromedia’s Flash and ActionScript products. Luckily, Adobe has continued the development of Flex post-acquistion of Macromedia and has just announced Flex version 2.0 on June 27th, 2006.

If you’re like me, you may want to see some Flex demos to get an idea of what Flex is can do. Believe me, it’s worth a look whether you’re a techie, online business owner or just curious about how much the web is growing.

Note: If you haven’t yet upgraded to Flash Player 9, you’ll likely be prompted to do so. These applications require Flash Player 9.

Onyx - Live online mixing environment for both video and sound. If you’re a Tractor fan, you’ll like this.

TimeTracker - Flex and ColdFusion application allows employees to enter their project time and comments quickly. TimeTracker not only allows easy time tracking but also basic reporting, including exporting to Microsoft Excel. Includes a demo of a dynamic pie chart.

Audio Visualization - Tool that analyzes and displays a frequency graph. If you’re an audiophile, you’ll recognize the peaks and valleys of the audio frequency in the dynamically created graph from other tools like SoundForge, Tractor, etc.

View more flex demos from the Adobe site. There is also a bar-code reader, online mp3 player (requires box.net account), an online store, online training module, photo apps and several other interesting application demos. Now on to the good stuff…

Adobe Flex is group of developer tools, libraries and runtime services that enable developers to build and deploy rich Internet applications (a.k.a. - Multimedia) that take advantage of the Flash® Player runtime.

Flex applications run inside the Flash player, leveraging the existing install base of the Flash player. One of the interesting advantages of Flash is it’s inherent cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. The other is the appearance and functionality of a desktop application in the browser.

Flex is made up largely of two parts. The first is an IDE built on the open source Eclipse platform. The second, is Adobe Flex Enterprise Services. This tool is largely targeted at large enterprises.

Here’s the breakdown of the release:

• Adobe Flex framework and Flex 2 SDK“The Flex component library includes over 100 components and containers, ranging from simple widgets like buttons and a color picker, to advanced controls like a data grid, accordion pane, and rich text editor.”The SDK is free of charge.
• Adobe Flex Charting 2Dynamically rendered, interactive chart data visualization tools.
• Adobe Flex Builder 2An Eclipse™ based IDE Development tool for coding and debugging.
• Adobe Flex Data Services 2Client-Server Runtime services

For AJAX, Flex also includes the Flex-Ajax Bridge and Ajax Client for Flex Data Services, released under open-source licenses.

For the PHP developers out there, check out the article on Zend.com about integrating Flex with PHP.

In the Adobe Labs, you can also find ActionScript 3.0 libraries for Unit Testing, Odeo, Flickr, Mapper, RSS and Atom feeds and YouTube. Handy stuff…