Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex Announced
byAdobe and Salesforce recently announced the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex. Although they’ve been working together for some time now, more official support for Flex within the Force.com platform is welcome. In this case, Salesforce addresses a common problem of intermittent connectivity. Like all SaaS platforms, with Salesforce.com you must have some connection to the internet for the application to work properly. Although Salesforce.com data is accessible through APIs for use in third party applications built on Adobe Flex (among many other platforms), the data dependency still poses a considerable challenge to developers designing disconnected applications. For example, a field representative might visit a facility in western North Dakota or some other remote location where internet connectivity is questionable. This is where the new Force.com Toolkit comes in handy.
The Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex adds offline data synchronization to the Flex Toolkit for Apex. In many cases, this new toolkit obviates the need for custom client-side data storage and the troublesome synchronization handlers that go with it. Although this does not yet make Salesforce.com work flawlessly on an airplane, its a step in the right direction for integrators and developers extending the already powerful Force.com platform.
Developers: The toolkit is available for download at Sourceforge here.
