Today at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco we announced the Flex Toolkit for Apex.  As you can read about on the wiki (and see in this screencast), this toolkit makes its possible – and easy – to use Adobe’s rich Internet application framework as a component with the rest of your Apex apps.  By doing so, you can create new user experiences that are perfectly suited for whatever your use case requires, augmenting the traditional HTML/list-detail view of data to including "rich" interactions like drag and drop, charting and a host of other great looking widgets.  And using the inline s-control functionality introduced as part of the Winter 07 release of the Apex platform, its easy to place these components directly on your page layouts, enabling their use in context with the rest of any app’s UI and data. Better yet, the binaries that represent a Flex app or component can easily be stored as the contents of an s-control, allowing these extensions to be delivered both with any addition infrastructure and within AppExchange packages.

In the process of building the toolkit over the past weeks and
months we’ve become big fans of this model – hopefully you’ll be able to quickly get a sense of how this can enliven your apps. The tutorial should provide a quick start to building your first Flex enhanced Apex app.  So take a look, have fun, be sure to let us know what you think, and what you build!