Data display, styling boosted Macromedia on Monday will introduce an upgrade to its Flex presentation server and framework for building rich Internet applications, with improvements in data display, visualization, styling, and performance.Version 1.5 of Flex ships in November, with prices starting at $12,000 for a two-CPU system. Flex enables enterprise developers familiar with C# and Java to build rich client applications using prebuilt components and then to deploy them in the Flash client.To boost display and visualization, Flex 1.5 features an enhanced charting and graphic component set. “If you’re building an executive dashboard, you now have a built-in set of charting and graphing components that allow you to build an application that helps you visualize data,” said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of product management at Macromedia. The company also has enhanced its DataGrid to more easily allow nesting of columns and rows. An expanded set of component styles enables developers to more quickly adjust a broader range of look and feel attributes, officials said.Performance is being optimized in the release through improvements such as the upgraded DataGrid. The application model, which provides for interaction of different components, has been improved as well. “The net effect of all those performance optimizations is that applications run faster on the end-user’s machine,” Whatcott said.An early user of Flex 1.5 cited speed and charting improvements. “We need rapid development environments and Flex provides us with a rapid development environment to use all the cool and efficient Flash components, for example, like drag and drop,” said Michael Prichard, IT manager at Rotech Healthcare, a medical equipment provider. The company is using Flex in customer service applications to automate order processing, replacing previous means such as faxes, he said. In the area of “skinning,” Macromedia has made it easier to provide a customized look and feel to applications. Previously, developers needed to have advanced Flash development skills to do this, Whatcott said. Styling improvements enable easier customization of look and feel through application of a style sheet. Macromedia is continuing its support of the Cascading Style Sheets standard for customizing Web content style. Software Development