Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Salesforce posted a new wiki page for a Flex Toolkit, allowing for rich interactive components to be built on Adobe’s Flex platform and integrated with Salesforce.com. The overview, per wiki page is:

The concept for this library is simple: Begin with the Salesforce AJAX toolkit, port the data layer to the ActionScript 3.0 programing language found in Adobe Flex, returning native strongly typed ActionScript objects for the Flex programmer to manipulate and render. This allows Flex programmers to build S-controls — components within the Apex interface where custom code can be executed — without dropping into JavaScript.

For more information:

• Visit the Flex Toolkit page on the Apex Wiki. There you will find Getting Started materials, downloads, object/class documentation, etc.
• Check out the screencast to learn about the IDE.
• See the end result in action in an AppExchange Test Drive

A good article appeared on the Wiki yesterday. It’s called Mashups: The What and Why. It’s geared more towards someone not totally familiar with mashups and introduces them to things that are possible. It’d be a good place to point clients to in learning about the concept.

FYI – in case you didn’t know already, you can stay up to date on new Wiki pages via RSS.

In the feed I use to track new AppExchange applications that get published, I saw an interesting one today from Salesforce Labs called the Scripting Toolkit.

It only installs 1 web tab and the tab points to http://www.interclasse.com/toolkit/ and sends parameters such as your Org ID, Session ID and User ID over to the page. After downloading it, I was a little suspect of the URL, so I went directly to http://www.interclasse.com/toolkit/ and was able to get what I needed.

Basically, the scripting toolkit is a “JavaScript Ajax wrapper around the API”. It only runs on Windows. It is very much like the AJAX toolkit except it also allows you to host your own JS files and run them via a command line rather than using a browser. In other words, you could use it to schedule things or just run JS files (AJAX Toolkit) from your desktop. There are a number of good examples in the documentation. It’s yet another useful way to use the API.

I would assume accessing it via the web tab in the AppExchange package is fine, but you can also get what you need directly from http://www.interclasse.com/toolkit/.

The new Apex Explorer (formerly known as sforce Explorer) has been released. You can download it from the ADN Wiki.

Part 3 of the the O’Reilly Network’s 3-part series about Salesforce.com was posted today. It’s called Packaging for Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

I updated my original post with the a link to part 3. You can get to all of them from there.