Adobe and BEA have announced partnership across four products: “The companies will work together to provide customers with a powerful design environment for rich Internet application (RIA) development. Separately, they will bring together best in class application server technology to help enterprises develop customer engagement applications. Under the terms of the agreement, BEA will bundle Adobe(R) Flex(TM) Builder(TM) 2 software with BEA Workshop(TM) Studio, empowering developers to rapidly build cross-platform RIAs that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure for high-performance enterprise mash-ups. Further, every Workshop Studio developer will now have access to Flex technology for building RIAs.

The agreement also calls for Adobe to distribute evaluation licenses of BEA's award winning application server, WebLogic Server, with Adobe LiveCycle(R) Enterprise Suite (ES) software.”

This partnership will definitely help both parties: Adobe in their efforts in getting into the enterprise development shops and BEA that’s losing positions to IBM on the Java EE market.  While Workshop is not the most popular IDE for developing Java applications, just having Flex Builder handy may spark some interest among Java developers in developing rich Internet applications with Flex.  The announcement does not say if a free version of Adobe LiveCicle Data Services ES Express (formerly Flex Data Services Express) will be bundled with WebLogic server. Currently, the Express edition is allowed only on single-CPU servers (is there such a thing?), but the chances are slim that WebLogic application server will be installed on such machines.

"We are pleased to be working with Adobe and enabling them to provide reliable, scalable and standards compliant infrastructure for LiveCycle ES," said Bill Roth, vice president of Workshop Products at BEA. "In partnering with Adobe we continue to demonstrate our ability to provide the most robust application infrastructure software on the market today."

LiveCycle ES can be used for creation of workflows, designing forms and producing PDF documents. While developers can design the input screens with PDF forms, a better practice would be to use Flex for creating of the interactive UI's and integrating them with LiveCycle ES.