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As part of the On AIR Bus Tour I’ve been showing a contact management application that uses Adobe’s AIR platform, SalesForce.com’s API and Nitobi’s Ajax Component suite. The basics premise for our demo is to help the sales person in the field take their customer contact info with them and update info even when they can’t get an internet connection. It allows users to work with their SalesForce.com data both online and offline, drag and drop Vcards from the desktop onto the app and sync changes that are made offline when a connection is detected.

Click here to watch my screencast. (No audio/editing yet, I’ve been fighting with Camtasia)

Why might SalesForce build an AIR app with Ajax?

1. Desktop integration would improve the user experience
2. They already have a widely used web app
3. They have in-house HTML/JS developers
4. They have a community that knows HTML/JS better than Flex.

Although SalesForce.com is a popular web based business tool, this scenario is quite common in enterprise apps today. HTML based UI that runs in the browser that without too much effort we can enhance with desktop capabilities. Lots of the application data is exposed through web services. I should also point out that SalesForce could definitely improve their existing web UI with some Ajax, but we won’t pick on them now;-)

The features we added to the existing app with AIR are:

1. Offline capababilies
2. Drag and Drop from the desktop
3. File reading and writing
4. Parsing Vcard client side
5. Custom chrome

Development benefits for us:

1. No cross domain issues so we can directly access the SalesForce data through their web API with no server proxy.
2. No server infrastructure to set up
3. Used existing Ajax components (with a bit of tweaking)