Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on October 25, 2009 at 11:36 PM

ppp.pngImagine you're traveling in the outback, driving your 4x4 up a dry riverbed, leaving behind a long trail of brown dust as you wend your way to the next meter point, where you measure the water table level and enter it into your Force.com application. Miles from nowhere, miles from any wifi or satellite connection, with nothing in the sky but circling scavenging birds, you interact with the cloud.

That's the power of Adobe© Flash© Builder™ for Force.com—it lets you build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that combine the power of the Adobe Flash Platform and the Force.com cloud computing platform.

The toolset, developed jointly by Adobe and salesforce.com, has a number of cool features, for example:

  • Online and offline data synchronization and management
  • A local data store, letting you create apps that work even when they're not connected
  • When you do connect (hungry and parched), you can make use of the conflict resolution service to help sync the changes back to Force.com app.
  • The IDE lets you compose the applications effortlessly too, and includes a gamut of user interface components for presenting, and visualizing your data - including charting and animation.

Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is currently in developer preview; so while it's not suitable for production work, it's just fine for you to start exploring.

Register to download the toolkit, and to attend the upcoming webinar that covers all the details of building RIAs for Force.com!

Here's a vid that shows much of it in action:

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Posted by Derek Laney on October 26, 2009 03:36 AM:

Is nothing sacred, where will I go for my holiday when wireless coverage isn't even an excuse :)

Awesome stuff Jon

Posted by Scott Morrison on October 26, 2009 10:19 AM:

It's cool, but why Adobe Air? Doesn't the HTML 5 spec include client side storage? It looks like for the beta there's a Flex license key. Will flex continue to be free once the salesforce plugin is out of beta?

Posted by Dave Carroll on October 26, 2009 11:28 AM:

Lack of ubiquitous support of HTML 5 is one reason. Also, this leverages Adobe's work on client side data services, sync and conflict resolution.

The spectre of on going variations in the support and implementation of HTML 5 is just too hairy to even contemplate.

Posted by Scott Morrison on October 26, 2009 11:59 AM:

Makes sense, does this point to a future flex version of salesforce? I remember a while back that salesforce was working on a fancy new interface but never released it because of IE6, is this the answer?

Posted by Andrew Waite on October 26, 2009 10:38 PM:

We're still working on the new user interface but it's not flash-based.

Posted by Hari on October 29, 2009 06:10 AM:

This is very cool. I am looking forward to the Charting components. Is there an easy way to convert the standard salesforce reports into flex charts ?

Posted by Chris David on October 29, 2009 12:01 PM:

Andrew: Will Google Gears be leveraged for the next generation of offline edition?

Posted by Jon Jessup on October 30, 2009 06:05 PM:

Very cool, thanks guys!

We're into the possibilities for us, but it looks like only AIR apps are currently supported. Any ETA for the Web apps beta?

Thanks,
Jon

Posted by Dave Carroll on November 2, 2009 10:09 AM:

Jon,

What did you have in mind? Currently we have the stand alone Flex toolkit for web apps and Flash Builder for Force.com includes the Flex toolkit for web apps.

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