Its a great time to be a developer.  As much as the tools of our trade tend to change, rarely to do they do so as rapidly - and with so much innovation - as they have in the past few months.  What it takes get simple things done has never been simpler, and even the hardest (and most interesting) things are in amazingly close reach.  AJAX, PHP and Ruby on Rails are a big part of this, and like we did with AJAX last fall, we want to make sure AppExchange developers have access to these new tools to create their integrations and new AppExchange apps.

So along with officially unveiling the AppExchange Developer Network today (something blog readers have already likely been enjoying in preview before this announcement), we are also introducing a new toolkit and new open source project to allow developers to easily take advantage of these tools in their projects. 

The first is our new PHP Toolkit.  Unlike other PHP samples for AppExchange you may have seen before, this toolkit - built with help from Zend and members of our developer community - offers complete access to all of the AppExchange API’s capabilities.   And since its built on 5.1, the toolkit is based on the new high performance SOAP stack in PHP, which will prove a boost to most applications.  With new samples and getting started documentation, we think this toolkit will not only make using PHP with AppExchange much easier than it has been in the past, but also provide a solid foundation for ensuring PHP is a first tier AppExchange development language moving forward.

Second is the new Ruby on Rails open source project for AppExchange, ActiveSalesforce.  Since both Rails and AppExchange are based on using meta data to accelerate application development, most AppExchange developers will be familiar with the motivation - if not the technology - behind this new app dev framework.  This project allows developers access to their AppExchange objects will all the benefits that Rails provides for other traditional datasources, including form generation and access to the MVC model. 

As always, let us know what you think, and how we can help you create your app for the AppExchange.