Flex technology is built for enterprise developers Looking to bring graphical Web development to enterprise developers, Macromedia will introduce this week Macromedia Flex, a presentation server and application framework for building rich Internet applications using existing tools, design patterns, and infrastructure.Part of the company’s MX product family and previously code-named Royale, Flex provides a standards-based “declarative” programming methodology and server run time for delivering rich user interfaces with the cross-platform Macromedia Flash client, Macromedia said.The declarative language in Flex is written in XML and uses standards such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Flex is also based on standards such as ECMAScript and SOAP Web services. The tool is intended for applications with features such as interactive animation, according to David Mendels, senior vice president of MX products at Macromedia. Developers familiar with languages such as Java or C# can utilize Flex, he said.“This provides a programming-language run time that will be very familiar and easy for that class of developers to build rich Internet applications,” Mendels said.Macromedia is working on two projects related to Flex, each code-named for famous early 1970s television shows. The projects are intended to provide rich tool support for the Flex framework and server run-time environment. One effort, code-named Brady, is based on Dreamweaver MX 2004 and is intended to provide a visual layout and integrated development environment and debugging for Flex applications. The second project, Partridge, will add integrated Flex programming support to the open source Eclipse environment, enabling coding, testing, and debugging of Flex applications. Flex is slated to be available in the first half of 2004. The initial release will run on J2EE application servers. Support for Microsoft .Net is planned for a future edition. Technology Industry