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Integrating Flex into Visualforce Pages

By Ryan Marples | Published: September 2, 2009

Last week, James Ward from Adobe and I delivered the "Developing Rich User Interfaces on Force.com Using Adobe Flex" webinar. For those of you who missed it, the full recording, slides and associated source code demonstrated can be found here. There were a flurry of questions at the end of the webinar and several of them had to do with using the <apex:flash> tag to display Flex-based Flash objects within Visualforce pages. So I thought I'd address some of the common questions around this.

How do I use the tag?

The tag has three required attributes: src, width, and height… Continue reading

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Flex and Force.com: Attend Thursday’s Webinar!

By Ryan Marples | Published: August 26, 2009

The combination of rich user experiences and cloud-based apps brings a lot of value to both end users and developers. What better technologies to build these types of applications on than Adobe Flex and Force.com? If you weren't aware, there is a Force.com Toolkit for Adobe Flex and AIR that enables developers to connect the back-end data and logic held within Force.com with the front-end presentation of a Flex application. If you've always wanted to learn how to use this toolkit – this is your chance. Tomorrow morning at 10am PST we will be co-presenting a webinar on this very… Continue reading

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An Update to the Force.com Toolkit for Adobe Flex and AIR

By Ryan Marples | Published: May 28, 2009

Hot on the heels of yesterday's toolkit announcement is another one, this time it's an update to our Force.com Toolkit for Adobe Flex and AIR. This toolkit enables developers building applications using Flex and AIR to be able to leverage the data and business processed held within Force.com. This combination of a rich user experience and the enterprise platform creates lots of opportuntiies for great applications.

This new revision of the toolkit has been updated to the latest version of the Force.com web services API and includes some fixes and updates. The cool thing is that some of these updates came
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New Force.com Integration Announced for Google App Engine for Java

By Ryan Marples | Published: May 27, 2009

Recently Google annouced availability of Java language support for Google App Engine, allowing Java developers across the globe to start building apps in the cloud. Well this morning, the first day of the Google I/O conference, salesforce.com is announcing the availability of "Force.com for Google App Engine for Java". This is a set of Java libraries that enables App Engine developers to access the Force.com web services API. Get all the details and the actual bits here.

This new combination of Force.com and Google App Engine means that all the business information and processes held within Force.com can now be exposed
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Research Report Finds Force.com App Dev Almost 5 Times Faster Than Java or .NET

By Ryan Marples | Published: May 14, 2009

We recently posted a research report by Nucleas Research (sorry, gotta enter your info to download) which found that Force.com application development provides 4.9 times faster development than Java and .NET development. There was some great comments that were surfaced as part of the study that I wanted to share.

One developer talked about an often overlooked aspect of Salesforce's cloud platform:
"Any time you develop you always have to be concerned with how it’s going to behave in the operating environment and keep up with software upgrades. We don’t have to worry about that. Traditionally, from one version to another there’s all
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Google/Salesforce Mashup for Non-Profits

By Ryan Marples | Published: May 11, 2009
I wanted to give props to my colleague Ron Hess who recently announced the release of a new application that helps non-profits produce maps of their partners, donors or any other relevant party. The application, produced by a collabration between the Salesforce.com Foundation and Google Earth Outreach, utilizes the new Google Earth browser plugin to generate a rich map based on data held within the non-profit's Salesforce CRM instance. This is a cool use of the technology, but also even cooler because it will help some great organizations do much good in the world. 
If you know of any organization who could
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A Rich Editor Component for Visualforce

By Ryan Marples | Published: May 4, 2009
Snapshot 2009-05-04 10-50-16

I've just completed my initial build of an open source Visualforce component for rich text editing. When used inside Visualforce pages, the end user will be able to apply things like colors, fonts and alignment to their text as well as add bulleted lists, images, links and flash. This is ideal for those "description" long-text fields that we see so often today. See below for a screenshot of what this would look like:

Before you give me too much credit, I should say that's it's based on an existing open-source editor called fckEditor written by Frederico Caldeira Knabben. I tweaked it
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An Approach to In-Place Editing with Visualforce

By Ryan Marples | Published: April 14, 2009
Picture 1

UPDATE: I've published a live version of this page so you can see the output and play with it live. You can find it at http://webinar-developer-edition.na1.force.com/projects

I recently created a Visualforce page that allowed users to manage projects. Rather than have the standard salesforce workflow of "click to detail screen" I wanted to have everything happen on the one page. After some experimentation I came up with an in-place editing design that I was pretty happy with in terms of user experience and also simplicity of implementation. I figured others might want to use something like this so I'm sharing… Continue reading

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Webinar Announcement: A Practical Overview of Building Apps on Force.com

By Ryan Marples | Published: February 11, 2009

We've just announced a new webinar that we'll be delivering Monday February 23rd at 10am PST. It's called "A Practical Overview of Building Apps on Force.com". Recently we've been doing webinars on specific technologies such as Apex, VisualForce and Sites. With all the new interest in Force.com as of late, we thought it was a good time to do a webinar where we step back and review the model of building applications on Force.com. We'll cover the architecture of an application, the major technologies involved and the development process.

If you or anybody you know have been hearing about "this Force.com… Continue reading

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How Much Better Could Your Applications Be?

By Ryan Marples | Published: February 9, 2009

It seems that developers are constantly re-inventing the wheel when it comes to starting new application development projects. Low-level routines that do things like handle database connections or write log files are needed, as well as higher-level features like a user account system or row/column data security. I'd like to suggest that time spent on these kinds of development is activities is fairly low-value. It's very rare that there's any unique skill or knowledge that a given developer has that makes his time spent on this kind of app under-pinnings valuable. Most people would agree that it's not strategic, that… Continue reading

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