Salesforce.com

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!

There’s so much fun stuff going on it’s hard to keep my blog up-to-date. But I did want to note a couple of things…

Bruce Eckel will be at JavaOne! He will spend some time in the Adobe booth and some time at various sessions. But the big news is that he and I will be co-presenting a short session before the Adobe Party on Wednesday night. This will be a fun thirty minute session that will be entertaining and educational. Too bad this isn’t an official JavaOne session, but I guess Sun doesn’t want me presenting about Flex at JavaOne (They rejected my three submissions but possibly for other reasons.) Following the short session will be the party. Food, drinks, and hanging out with Bruce Eckel! Stop by the Adobe booth at JavaOne to get your official invitation (which I think you will need to get in).

A few months ago I met with Salesforce.com about Flex and Apollo. They had begun building some Flex applications that used the Flex Ajax Bridge to communicate with Salesforce. This worked but they wanted to be able to more easily build Flex and Apollo applications. So I took their JavaScript library and did an initial port to ActionScript. Surprisingly the code ported pretty easily. It was actually a fascinating experiment. ActionScript 3 is based on the same specification as JavaScript 2, so in theory this kind of thing should be pretty trivial — especially if the code being ported doesn’t do much with the browser DOM. That was the situation in this case because the Salesforce JavaScript library talks to their backend via XHR and doesn’t do much with the browser DOM. Once I had an initial port done including authentication and query support Ron and Dave from Salesforce.com cleaned everything up, added better object typing, built complex examples, and developed an Apollo demo. Everything has been going on under a semi-secret SourceForge project, code named Mavericks.

Sorry this blog has been pretty stagnant lately. Things have been totally crazy. I’ve been touring the country speaking at Java User Groups and other conferences. The JUGs have been really fun. It’s amazing to see how quickly the Java crowd falls in love with Flex, like I did a few years ago. There are still more JUGs, conferences, and eSeminars coming up so please check out the schedule and see if I happen to be in your home town sometime soon. If you will be around the Bay Area for JavaOne, we will be throwing a huge bash with Bruce Eckel. The details are still being finalized, but stay tuned. Also coming in October is the annual Adobe developer conference, called MAX. It will be full of top notch Flex sessions by many of our star engineers. Definitely not something you want to miss. In May I’ll be doing a triple header in Vegas; Las Vegas Adobe User Group, Nevada Java User Group, and Interop. Hopefully some of these events are in your home town since I’d love to meet you all in person!