"With Flex 2.0 and Flash Player 8.5, we can finally deliver the kinds of rich applications our clients demand without compromise. That's Web 2.0!" With these words, a VP at Cynergy Systems today gave his ringing endorsement of the Adobe Flex 2.0 product line and Adobe Flash Player 8.5.

The VP, Dave Wolf, was speaking out as Adobe today announced the public beta of Adobe Flex 2.0.

"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," said David Mendels (pictured), 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 can't wait to see what developers will do with the new capabilities found in this release," Mendels continued.

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

The Flex 2.0 product line, Mendels explained, comes with what he described as a powerful and extensible application framework, intuitive programming model, standards-based data integration, and a powerful Eclipse-based integrated 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 enables 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," he added.

The following components are part of the Flex beta program:

• Flash Player 8.5 -- the latest 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 rich 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

Beta versions of the full Adobe Flex 2.0 product line and Adobe Flash Player 8.5 are available now from Adobe Labs. Readers can visit http://labs.adobe.com.