Students can get the Flex Builder 2 integrated development tool for rich web applications at no cost, seeding the market for future AIR development.Adobe announced last week that it would give away its Flex Builder 2 integrated development environment to students and faculty at educational institutions worldwide.
The offer comes as Adobe prepares to release Flex 3 and its new Adobe AIR architecture, which will extend the reach of what Adobe calls "rich internet applications"(RIAs) built with Flex to the desktop. The IDE will become available as a download in early November.
Peter Issacson, vice president of education marketing at Adobe, said, "It is clear that RIAs are the future of Web development, and a strong skill set in RIA development will serve students well in their careers... By making it easier for educational institutions to adopt Flex 2, we are ensuring that students and researchers are better equipped to harness the power of Web 2.0 and RIAs."
"People with Adobe Flex skills are already in big demand in the industry, and this smart move will help to substantially increase the number of Flex-enabled college graduates," said Yakov Fain, adjunct professor at New York University. NYU currently offers courses in Flex, and Fain said that the free software would "help professors better prepare our students for the future."
Adobe already offers a free Flex 2 SDK for development of commercial applications, and plans to open-source the Flex SDX with the release of Flex 3 and AIR early next year, enabling developers to extend and contribute to the source code for Flex's compiler, components and application framework.
