Get started

Follow the steps below to get your first Flex salesforce app up in Salesforce.

1. Register a developer edition account from Salesforce. Note: Dev account never expires but the account does come with a few limitations. You can only have two users, one an admin account so that you can build and install applications and the other a normal user account so you can test your work from the perspective of a normal user. The account has a 2MB data limit and you can send mass email. However, It is totally fine for playing around all the features that Salesforce provides.
   
2. Download the Flex Salesforce Toolkit (ie. force.com-air_flex-1.0.zip). This toolkit provides the needed libraries to communicate directly with your salesforce.com database records from within a Flex application, using native ActionScript packages and returning strongly typed classes.The documentation on the classes can be found here.
3. In this zip file, there is a library called as3Salesforce.swc in the bin directory just off the root of this zip file. It is the library you need to associate to your Flex project.
4. Create a Flex project and include the swc library in it.
5. You can follow this screencast to get your first project up.

What you can do after that?

Now you have your Flex application run locally in Salesforce. Here is my TODO list and the solutions of each one.

1. Run your app under your own website and pull info from Salesforce using the same api.
2. Run your app under Salesforce and have it pulled data from your system thru Flex Remoting (HTTPService, WebService, RemoteObject…etc).
3. Can we use the API to pull Salesforce metadata like SControl?
4. How can we provide our application via Apex Exchange?
   • Introduction of Salesforce’s AppExchange
   • Using Salesforce’s API
   • Packaging for salesforce’s appexchange
5. How can we use the Salesforce Flex AIR Toolkit to make have your application deal with Salesforce in offline mode? Look into this article.

What Flex gives you but not original Salesforce UI?

Now you know how to integrate Flex with Salesforce. But what problems that Flex helps us solving but not the original Salesforce UI?

1. Capture user events on the fly and display additional fields or populate bunch of fields.
2. Visual the data via Flex charting.
3. Full control on the layout, and look and feel.