Flex 2 Beta 3 becomes available to the general public today. I’m glad to be a part of this exiting and vibrant community of people.  In my opinion, Flex community  carries lots and lots of positive energy these days. I’ve been participating in all phases of pre-release Flex testing, and can state that lots and lots of people have contributed into making this product a state of the art tool. Flex online user’s forums are growing at the speed of sound. Last year I’ve casually subscribed to the Flex Coders mailing list. Oh boy! They have about a hundred of posts a day. People can’t wait to see their new baby out and in a good shape. Smart changes in the pricing policy will make this product appealing to any small independent software vendor or a Web site master.

Having said all these nice things about the product, I’d suggest Adobe marketing team order a T-shirt reading: “I survived Flex 2 Alpha, Beta 1, Beta 2, and Beta 3. Will I survive the production release?” By the way, I’m wearing an L-size.

Having four releases in 5 months is a little bit too much. Have mercy on early adopters! We write an advanced  book on  Flex 2 and its integration with Java, and changing samples code and regression tests after each new Beta-N release is not fun. I’m sure Adobe is trying to make their product as good as it gets, but I prefer the Beta-policy of Yahoo or Google. These companies create a production-grade tool and mark it  Beta for a year or so.

Anyway, if year 2006 is the year of AJAX, the year 2007 will be the year of Flex 2. I also keep an eye on Microsoft’s rich client technologies  XAML and Avalon. Today Adobe is way ahead, but I’m sure Microsoft will give Adobe a run for their money. But this battle won’t happen till 2008. Meanwhile, start looking at developing Rich Internet Applications with Flex. May’s issue of JDJ, will have our article showing  an interesting  application that brings together Flex 2 and Java.