Flex Toolkit for Apex with added Apollo

James Ward was kind enough to point to the tutorial I blogged about yesterday in Flex Toolkit for Apex. He added a little spice though, showing how to create an Apollo application too.

What this means is that not only can you easily build powerful Flex/Salesforce mashups, but you can take these RIAs and deploy them to the desktop too. Software as a service meets the desktop as a client.

Technorati Tags: flex, apollo, saas, salesforce

Flex Toolkit for Apex

Last week I read a few tidbits about folk wanting to see Flex on Salesforce. See Anatole Tartakovsky who wrote “After spending a week with SalesForce development I feel very strongly that a service with embedded Flex doing communications and metadata for both Flex and AJAX is a boon for developers and user.” Indeed it is. Tim Anderson received a hint about Flex, and was “staying tuned.”

Well, if you are tuned in, it’s now official—there’s a great new Flex Toolkit for Apex that allows you to create your own Flex applications that utilize the Salesforce platform, making it really easy to create rich GUIs to your data, making it really easy to create mashups on the Salesforce platform, and with Apollo, create offline applications too.

Some links:

• I wrote an article introducing the toolkit: Creating Flex Salesforce Mashups. It’s got a walk-through screencast too.
• Adam Gross just blogged about the release.
• The Apex Developer Network has a great Flex Toolkit page dedicated to the release, with a great screencast from Adam showing what you can potentially do with a mashup created using Flex/Salesforce.

Technorati Tags: mashups, flex, salesforce

Mashups: The What and Why

I’ve spoken about mashups before on this blog, and now I’ve written a lot more in the article Mashups: The What and Why available over on ADN.

As I indicate in the abstract:

Mashups are all the rage, but what exactly are they and should we be creating and enabling them? This article series explores mashups, providing the fundamentals as well as the practice behind the concept. This first article provides an introduction to the core concepts founds in mashups, examining the background, techniques and consequences of using, creating and enabling mashups in your IT infrastructure.

The second article in this series presents several concrete techniques for building mashups. By the end of the second article you will be in a position to comfortably create your own mashups on the Salesforce platform.