Can I "do" Flex for free?

Question

Excuse if I have posted this in the wrong area... I am
looking over all the Flex info and am a bit confused on
a) all the pieces involved to "do" Flex, and
b) what is free and what is going to cost big $$$.
I see there is an express (dumbed-down?) version of the
Eclipse IDE tool which appears to be free. And some components that
are free (for any use?) if they are limited to a single CPU . And I
also see there is a Flex server for $20,000! So if I wanted to
create an internal flex app for my small business, is that possible
for free? What if I wanted to create an app for our
"outward-facing" web site for our clients? and what if I wanted to
create a Flex app for another client for their web site? I guess I
am really asking what kind of $$$ would it cost to Live in Flex,
and if this is more for enterprise budgets and not small shops or
free lance developers.
Thanks!
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Answer 1

Hey Man,
I hear you it can be a bit confusing. So lets break it down a
bit. There are several flex products and each has a couple
versions. So the first one is the Flex 2 SDK. This is freely
available and includes all the framework files and a command line
compiler. This allows you to use notepad or any other text editor
to write your mxml and as code and compile it. This is completly
free on non-restrictice of what you do with the swf you create.
However tools are a big part of any development language so
the next product is Flex Builder 2. Flex Builder (FB) is an IDE
(Integrated Development Environment) that has all sorts of tools
for writing your code including a visual wysiwyg editor for your
flex application. Its has a built in debugger and lots of features.
Flex Builder 2 costs $499.
Both the flex sdk and flex builder allow you to create flex 2
swf applications which you can deploy to as many servers as you
like, they get uploaded just like a swf made in the Flash 8 IDE..
Or heck sell them at your discretion (the swf not the sdk or
flexbuilder ). With both of these you can communicate with a
backend server using RPC (remote procedure call) invocations. These
can be done over http using the httpService, soap using webService,
and AMF using RemoteObject to talk to ColdFusion.
Then next peice of the software puzzle is the Charting
Components. By themselves I think they are around 300 dollars. but
You can also buy them bundled with flex builder and get both
products for (I think) around 50 less than buying them seperate.
The last peice is the Flex Data Services. This is a J2EE
server and allows for exceptional functionality including
messaging, colloaboration, and data syncronization. There is a free
version of this application taht is limited to 1 cpu servers and
100 connections. This product is called FDS Express. Then there is
the full version of this server that costs in the range ow $20,000.
So as you see there are a couple routes you can take to use
Flex for free, but to get the "Enterprise" features and tooling you
will need to shell out a little dow. Depending on what you are
looking for, it could be alot of dow :)
Hope that helps,
simeon