The Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex lets you add a new level of dynamic, interactive user experiences to your Force.com applications. The toolkit provides direct access to your data and logic on the platform by wrapping around the Force.com Web Services API. Using the toolkit, you can build Flex applications, or utilize existing Flex components, to create a new way to interface with the data on Force.com, driving end-user productivity.

There are two general approaches: you can create highly interactive Flex applications that provide a rich user experience around your data and logic, and embed this application within your existing pages using Visualforce. Or you can build an offline desktop application with that same access to your logic and data, but which can be run without firing up a browser.

Getting Started with the Force.com for AIR and Flex Toolkit

Before you get started, think about you would like to accomplish with the toolkit. It opens up a number of new UI opportunities:

  • You can create a custom UI component such as a drag and drop grid or dynamic chart, and embedded it directly into your Force.com app's Visualforce page
  • You can build an AIR-based desktop application that provides offline access to your Force.com application's data
  • You can include third party Flex components to build even richer interactions with the data on your Force.com apps

Getting started really is easy. The following code snippets show how easy it is to establish a connection from a Flex application and execute a query: 

<salesforce:Connection id="force"/>
...                            
private function loginSuccess(result:LoginResult):void
{
  force.query("SELECT Id, LastName FROM Contact", 
                     new AsyncResponder(querySuccess));
}

For full details, see Getting Started with the Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex.

Toolkit Resources and Documentation

The following resources will get you up and started with the toolkit:

Other Resources

Check out these other resources that may be of interest: