Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco this week plans to unveil Version 3.1 of its Tibco General Interface AJAX tools, while San Jose-based Adobe earlier this month introduced the public beta of its Adobe Flex 2.0 and Adobe Flash Player 8.5 tools, which use a proprietary scripting language.

Chris Ogden, director of software development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Public Health, plans to use Flex 2.0 to convert a large legacy system to the Web. The school also will be moving existing projects that use Flex 1.5 to 2.0.

"[The legacy system] uses databases that aren't supported anymore, so the new data-connection layers will allow us to extract and convert this legacy application in pieces [rather than] all at once," he said.

Constellation Energy Group Inc., a Baltimore-based commercial and industrial electric power supplier, is using Version 3.0 of Tibco's General Interface AJAX tools to move client/server applications to its portal. Jeffrey Johnson, Constellation's manager of corporate applications, said the company plans to continue using the tools to update all of its Web applications.

The tool sets from both vendors are targeted at companies that want to build Internet applications with rich content and interactive features that can be accessed via a thin client.