Adobe Systems on Monday launched an Amazon-hosted version of its LiveCycle application development environment for building rich Internet applications on Adobe's Flex platform.

The LiveCycle ES Developer Express product is available through Amazon Web Services, which opens the retailer's data center for developing and hosting online applications and storing data. Amazon calls the former the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, and the latter the Simple Storage Service, or S3.

Through Amazon, Adobe is offering a self-contained development environment where applications can be prototyped, developed, and tested without the need to install and configure LiveCycle, the company said. Applications are pre-configured to run server instances on the EC2 server, which makes it faster for developers to begin testing and modifying applications, according to Adobe.

"Today's news shows further support for our enterprise developer community, providing a 'sandbox in the sky' for rolling out LiveCycle ES applications faster than ever," Kumar Vora, VP and general manager for LiveCycle at Adobe, said in a statement.

The latest tool is available to members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program.

Amazon Web Services is the result of the retailer's strategy to serve as an extension of corporate data centers for new applications and overflow capacity. Over time, the retailer hopes to take on more and more of the IT workload from businesses that see value in the cloud computing model.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels was selected as InformationWeek's chief of the year in 2008.