I spoke to Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at Salesforce.com, about the new Summer 07 release. This includes the first full release of Apex Code, a server-side programming language which lets you customize and extend Salesforce.com applications. Currently Apex Code is only available in the high-end Unlimited Edition.

Gross told me that Apex Code has acquired some interesting new capabilities since we last spoke about its preview release. This includes the ability to make outgoing web service calls, a capability which is particularly interesting because it enables mash-ups with third-party web applications that also expose a web services API. Salesforce.com is a big user of SOAP, by the way, in contrast to all the negative press that SOAP seems to get elsewhere. You can develop Apex Code in Eclipse, though debugging is still fairly painful.

The mash-up idea is compelling. One of the key challenges of hosted applications is integration with local applications. Things like complex Outlook connectors are common, along with the ability to export data as Excel or Word documents. That friction can be reduced by moving more of your data online. For example, Gross told me that developers have already devised ways to export Salesforce.com reports directly into Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets. From there, you could easily share it with colleagues. In fact, the same application could email the link to a list of recipients. That makes more sense than exporting to Excel, attaching it to an email in Outlook, and sending it out again. Note that Google and Salesforce.com announced a strategic alliance in June, but this focused on AdWords which is less interesting.

Another key Salesforce.com partner is Adobe. Gross tells me that he sees wide take-up for Flex and AIR among Salesforce.com developers. There is a Flex Toolkit which simplifies the development of Flex or AIR applications that call Salesforce.com APIs. “The take up of the Flex Toolkit has been breathtaking,” says Gross. “We are already seeing companies create offline applications written in AIR, even though that product is still in beta.” He also praises the productivity of Flex – apparently some developers use it for that reason alone.

The offline aspect of AIR is vital, as it addresses the most obvious weakness of the Salesforce.com platform. Google Gears could be used for this as well, though I got the impression that Gross sees more take-up for AIR at the moment. He says there will be further announcements on both at the Dreamforce conference in September.

The vast majority of Salesforce.com usage seems still to be CRM, though there is no inherent reason why the platform should not support ERP or other application types. Its strength is the vast amount of pre-built functionality. Concerns include the cost – especially if the company reserves key features like Apex Code for its high-end edition – and the risk of vendor lock-in. See here for a good overview of the Salesforce.com platform.