Using Adobe Flex to Build Rich On-Demand App - Follow Up
by Dave Carroll on June 27, 2007 at 12:56 PM
Thanks to all of you who attended the webinar today. We really enjoyed presenting the exciting combination of Adobe Flex/AIR and the salesforce.com platform. I have created a wiki page to contain the code that I demonstrated today.
The sample is simplistic but illustrates some key concepts when using Flex and the Flex Toolkit for Apex. First is the data binding piece. Flex natively supports collections as the data source for data binding. The Flex Toolkit for Apex returns a collection as the result of a query. This makes simple binding extremely easy.
Another concept that is key, but was not illustrated in the webinar, is the ability to create your own components based on (inheriting from) the standard SDK components. This makes modifying the behavior of items like the Grid component very easy. This is especially true when compared to other "traditional" RIA technologies.
Grab the trial version of Flex Builder, or better yet, take advantage of the discount code presented in the webinar, and try some of this stuff out yourself. I am confident that you will not only find it useful but fun as well.
Desktop Widgets Revisted
by Dave Carroll on May 25, 2007 at 03:36 PM
A while back, when the AJAX toolkit was in it's initial form, I created a sample that used a then new technology called Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) to create a couple of desktop widgets. At the time, it was a pretty cool and powerful way to bring salesforce.com and platform data to your desktop.
Since then, I have had the great pleasure of working with Ron Hess (Platform Evangelist for salesforce.com) and James Ward (Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe) from Adobe. Together, over a 7 day span, we ported the current AJAX toolkit to Flex and ActionScript. The result is the ability to create Rich Internet Applications (ala AJAX) that natively and easily use the salesforce.com platform as the data layer.
This also means that, since Adobe Apollo is based on Flex, you can create these RIAs outside of the browser. Thanks to a great demo application in the category of "Stupid Apollo Tricks" called Bounce that illustrates a full screen, transparent apollo application, I started thinking again about desktop widgets. That of course lead back to the original K-widget, the modified Day Planner widget, that shows events and tasks assigned to you in salesforce.com. This is the simplest thing that I thought I could make that might be useful.
I have published a wiki page here were you can learn about this widget app and examine, download, and leverage the sample code. This Apollo app is just a proof of concept and likely has some bugs, but with the rich component set and functionality of Flex/Apollo (not the least interesting of which is charting) it is my sincere hope that you will create very compelling and diverse widget type Apollo apps.
SkypeForce - Skype integrated with Salesforce.com
by PK on August 11, 2005 at 11:24 PM
One of our amazing Sales Engineers has built an incredible integration from Salesforce to Skype, using Sforce of course!
The best part about it is it's open source!
Check it out on the Sforce area of Sourceforge
http://sforce.sourceforge.net/skypeforce.html
You can also get it from Skype:
http://share.skype.com/directory/skypeforce/view/
So what will it do for you?
- Automatic search and navigation for inbound and outbound calls from Skype
- Clean popup handling and close when dialing out from Salesforce to Skype
- SSO web links. A link on the home page can share a users session with SkypeForce, saving the need for double login.
- May be hidden in the Windows system tray
We hope you enjoy it!
