As we reported last winter, Flex 2.0 is designed to take on more complex apps, such as home mortgage applications that are data-intensive. And it supports a bridge to the Ajax, which was also announced around the same time.

Adobe also claims that the Flex 2 client improves performance, pulling down as many as 20,000 records in a few hundred milliseconds.

With the release comes the tooling. When Adobe first announced Flex 2 last fall, it said that it would make the core software development kit (SDK), which provides the core programmer tooling without the bells and whistles of a visual IDE, available for free. The SDK just released includes the framework itself, compiler, documentation, and a command line debugger.

Adobe is also making available for free single CPU version of Flex Data Services, which supports the building of data-intensive apps that in some cases might require streaming or messaging to deliver data to the Flex client. It also provides hooks for linking into popular middleware platforms with APIs to JMS (Java Message service) or the Hibernate framework.

The Eclipse-based FlexBuilder IDE itself will sell for $499 for the basic edition, and $749 for a deluxe version that includes fancy charting. Additionally, the enterprise version of Flex Data Services, which supports multi-CPU or clustered environments, will sell for $20,000/server.