Last week was a big week for Adobe. Flex 2 – the major revision of their RIA tool was released. Flash Player 9 and Flex Data Services were also released at the same time with a preview release of the next version of the Flash Professional 9 IDE made available on Adobe Labs as well.

Trial versions of Flex Builder and Flex Data Services are available for download.

Remember that you can author, compile and deploy Flex 2 applications for FREE (that’s no cost), but that’s authoring with a text editor. Flex Builder is a great IDE built on top of Eclipse, I’d recommend that you give it a try.

Adobe have aggressively priced it, while there’s no official Australian pricing as yet it’s available on the US site for USD$499.00. A free edition of Flex Data Services is available.

Flex.org was launched at the same time as the announcement, a developer site it appears to have a lot of good resources on it already.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Flex you might like to have a look at an article that I recently wrote for this site.