Adobe Offers Flex Builder 2 to Students and Faculty at No Cost
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced that it is offering Adobe Flex Builder 2 software at no cost to students and faculty at educational institutions worldwide. The Flex Builder 2 integrated development environment (IDE) is part of a toolset for designing and developing rich Internet applications (RIAs). Web 2.0 technologies have spurred the development of RIAs that enable data sharing, collaboration, user participation, social networking, and more. Flex is an advanced framework for building cross-operating system RIAs for the Web. By offering Flex Builder 2 at no cost, educational institutions will be able to improve students' and researchers' knowledge of RIA development. With Flex 3, currently in public beta, students will be able to extend their RIAs to the desktop using Adobe AIR. Flex applications can be commercially created and deployed today with the free Flex 2 SDK, which includes the Flex compiler and the ActionScript 3.0 libraries. Beginning with the release of Flex 3 in early 2008, the Flex SDK will be made available as open source, enabling developers to extend and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler, components and application framework. Adobe Flex 2 will be available to qualified education end-users for free download on Adobe.com in early November. http://www.adobe.com
