Salesforce Flex / Apollo Sample – Offline Data Sync
On Monday I presented at the Salesforce Developer Conference in Santa Clara. It was a great conference! The keynote was especially exciting because it kinda turned into the Flex/Apollo show. Near the middle of his keynote Marc Benioff went on about how great Adobe is for innovating with Flex and Apollo. He then brought Kevin Lynch on stage who did his usual Apollo demos, which filled the crowd with “Ooos” and “Ahhhs”. Then they brought up someone who built some amazing Salesforce based applications. And guess what? It was a Flex app running inside a Salesforce S-Control! Then Adam Gross and Parker Harris from Salesforce took the stage to present even more Flex applications! It felt for a second like I was at Max!
I was pretty excited to see all the broad uses of the Flex Toolkit for Apex which has been the catalyst for Salesforce jumping further into the Flex & Apollo world. The Toolkit started as one of my “plane projects” where I took the existing Salesforce JavaScript library and did regex replaces on the code, moved the prototype stuff to proper classes, added static typing, and finally got the thing to compile. Thanks primarily to Dave Carroll and Ron Hess from Salesforce as well as Seth Hodgson from the Flex Data Services team, the Toolkit evolved well beyond a “plane project” and is now being used in demos and production applications!
Back to the conference… Throughout the day I stopped by the Adobe demo pod to show demos and give out Apollo books. Dave Carroll and I also co-presented a one hour session to a packed audience of about 250.
The use of Flex and Apollo in the Salesforce world is taking off! Like I said in my session on Monday… Salesforce is revolutionizing how we build back-ends! Flex & Apollo are revolutionizing how we build front-ends! Bringing these two technologies together is a perfect match!
Now on to the Salesforce Apollo Sample…
AccountTracker2.air - Apollo Sample (Requires Apollo Alpha)
This Apollo application is one of the samples we are working on for the Flex Toolkit for Apex. It has some cool offline data sync capabilities. However currently the sync is only one way and some of the application is just smoke and mirrors (the chart data is fake because I was in crunch mode getting this ready for the Web 2.0 conference). But it really does pull most of its data from Salesforce.com and syncs data and files to the local system so that it works offline. I can’t take credit for much of this application. I did some polishing but most of the work was done by Dave Carroll and Ron Hess from Salesforce. They have both put in a ton of work to the Toolkit and the samples. So big thanks to them!
If you want to see how to start building Flex and Apollo applications using the Flex Toolkit for Apex, check out these resources:
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Flex_Toolkit
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Tutorial:_Creating_Flex_Salesforce_Mashups