If you haven't heard of it, Flex is an Adobe product that makes it possible to edit Flash applications in an IDE similar to what most programmers are used to, rather than trying to edit your Flash application as a movie timeline. The SDK for Flex 4 is open source and available for download. Adobe's tool for editing Flex applications (based on the Eclipse IDE) used to just be called Flex. Adobe is now making a distinction between the Flex architecture and the tools you can use. The new version is called Flash Builder, and the trial version is available for download.
Steve Wright is a project manager and software guy with a broad background in web technologies. Et Melius is his lab notebook, serving as an archive of lessons learned on the path to building and deploying a library of cool web apps.