Salesforce.com announced its Spring 07 release yesterday, including what it calls an Business version of MySpace: a portal where organizations can share of their data or applications with their customers and collaborate with them. During a briefing, I talked to Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing. Salesforce.com has a SOAP web services API, and apparently more than half of the platform traffic is via the API rather than through direct visits to the Salesforce.com site. Would it make sense for Salesforce.com to use Adobe’s Flex Data Services to support rich internet applications created with Flex or Apollo?

“Stay tuned,” was his response. “Flex makes so much sense for us. I can build those experiences, just like I can in AJAX,but I can build richer experiences that are easy to build, they plug right in and I can upload them to Salesforce, it’s hand in glove to our model.”

Of course it is already possible to use Flex with Salesforce.com, since Flex supports SOAP web services. On the other hand, if Saleforce.com exposed a Flex Data Services API using AMF (Action Message Format), that would make for smoother, faster and easier development of Flex clients, which use the Flash player as a runtime.

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