But as Jens C. Brynildsen of Flashmagazine points out, the tool is still “hard to use for the uninitiated.” He also remarks on the “limitations on scale and scope” that make Flash somewhat ill-suited for larger, professional Web applications. Brynildsen comments on the competition it faces from AJAX and the Windows Vista Rich Internet Applications (RIA), as well.

Flash is not a lost cause, though, or even a losing one. There are several groups who intend to “combine Flash and AJAX to take web applications one step further.” Adobe’s Apollo platform has established a (proverbial) defense against Microsoft developments, and Brynildsen believes that “with Flex 2, they now have the tool to win developers over to their side.”

As one might expect, Adobe’s executives have a good deal of confidence in their products. “Now Flash app development is even more compelling and a lot easier,” said Bill McCoy, General Manager of the ePublishing Business at Adobe, to BetaNews.

On the more technical side of things, McCoy said, “Flash Player 9′s new ActionScript 3, compatible with proposed next-level of ECMAScript, is a powerful language that supports direct XML processing (ECMAScript for XML, aka E4X), strong types, inheritance and mix-in interfaces, exceptions, and other robust software-engineering capabilities.”

For Flash and Flex fans, these new products represent positive developments. Whether they can carry Adobe into the future remains to be seen.

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Senior group manager Ben Watson of Adobe’s Technical Evangelism Group started off our chat about what was the forthcoming release of Flex 2 by illustrating a couple of points the company wanted the development platform to address.

First, they had to solve Flash building issues with constructing business applications. And second, with back-end functions collapsing into service-oriented architectures (SOA), there was a need to expose functions as services.

Flex 2′s strength comes from preserving that SOA backend, Watson said, while permitting application developers using the platform to deliver a clean app to the client side in Flash.

That’s part of Adobe’s continued evolution toward find a “best of” ground from the worlds of client/server and web-based applications. The effort, part of what Watson dubbed Adobe’s Engagement Platform, aspire beyond the desktop and notebook to places like the mobile phone, and embedded applications.

The simplified, abstracted development environment enabled by Flex 2 offers deeper integration points with other applications, Watson said. From there, Adobe sees the next move for applications to cross-phone/portable devices and on-demand desktop applications.

Flex 2′s environment has its roots in a very familiar one: Eclipse. The Flex Builder 2 product was built on top of Eclipse’s framework, a decision that offers the prospect of better management of the development process.

From Builder, the developer can completely design, compile, and deploy applications, all from the environment. Builder generates code essentially as XML, and the developer can insert ActionScript into the applications as desired too.

Flex Builder 2 with Charting may be purchased to have access to its chart creation functions. The XML-controlled charting permits the developer to include more useful representations of data in applications, delivering an experience familiar to regular users of spreadsheet software.

The Flex 2 SDK, including the framework and command line compiler, has been made available free of charge. Another component, Flex Data Services 2, is available in an Express version, a single full production license for a single CPU machine, free of charge.

Flex Data Services 2 represents a significant accomplishment by Adobe’s development teams. They have boosted the speed and performance of the data services, 20 to 30 times faster than the previous version.

Also, Data Services offers robust messaging and quick data paging. The latter allows the client-side user to conduct rapid data sorting, as Watson demonstrated during the conversation.

Flex 2 drove development of Flash Player 9, also available today. Flash Player 9 contains two virtual machines, one for processing older ActionScript 1 or 2, the other for ActionScript 3.

Watson said that multiple instances of Flash applications would run in their separate VMs. That should translate nicely to reduced memory usage and the ability to effectively handle web services processing in Player.

An external API permits developers to integrate Flash with other applications. Those apps can “talk” through the API and change what appears in the Flash Player by setting new values in the client-side application. Also, Flex can potentially use every keyboard or mouse event to drive actions.

Ajax components are being built for Flash. We have already seen these combinations online, like the Google Finance service or the addictive video experience of YouTube as examples Watson cited.

I asked about security, since the focus of Flex is on enterprises and business applications. Watson said Flex calls data based on the security of the data model. Security classes can be set within an application, so multiple users of the same app can be differentiated by their permitted level of access.

The massive beta test of Flex 2 included the efforts of 70,000 testers in the program. Adobe crafted Flex 2 to allow developers to see verbose error reporting so apps can be fixed as needed.

Developers do not have to write database controls in Flex. That along with the features of the environment should let non-Flash developers get into Flex quickly. There is still a learning curve developers will have to overcome to become proficient.

Working toward that proficiency will reward the developer in the long run. Adobe has to meet the challenge of convincing developers to do things the Adobe way, and comply with ActionScript standards.

Do so, and the payoff will be in the performance, Watson said.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.