Macromedia Flex, a new application server technology that builds .swf’s from xml based documents (MXML) is now available to anybody that has a spare $12,000 floating around (how much???). James Talbot from Macromedia got me really excited about this technology at the MXDU Conference in Sydney recently and it looks very promising for Flash Developers like myself and you. If all goes well and Macromedia market this properly, in the near future, a new market will open up for us, developing RIA’s with Flex and components for Flex. The basis of Flex is simple, write an xml document utilising the MXML tags, stick it on the server, when a request for that MXML document is made, the Flex application server parses it and outputs a Flash Movie. Lots of sample MXML can be found here. A new tool called Brady will be released in the not so distant future that will make the authoring of MXML documents much easier… more on that when the day arrives. A tonne of information on Flex, is already available on Macromedia Devnet. No developer version is available as of yet but would imagine their will be one soon.