Adobe Flex Evangelist Christophe Coenraets showed how the company's Flex product (acquired via the recent Macromedia acquisition) extends the Ajax approach to web application development, in a presentation at the Real-World Ajax Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on June 6.

Coenraets described Flex as being built on top of Ajax schemes, to add "expressiveness, to create extremely fluid user interfaces" to customers' evolving Ajax development efforts. He also said that Flex performance is enhanced with a JVM and just-in-time compiler inside the browser, and also has offline as well as real-time capabilities.

Coenraets took conference attendees through a tour de force of applications developed with Flex, including maps of New York, and real-time solutions incorporating video for call centers and other business applications.

Flex requires a Flash plug-in, naturally, and Coenraets happily noted that Flash is, in fact, installed in 600 million PCs and devices, "and in 98% of of computers connected to the Internet."

Coenraets' presentation was streamed live to a worldwide audience via SYS-CON.TV.  The event is colocated with SOA Web Services Edge and the Enterprise Open Source Conference and Exhibition, and is being held June 5-6.