Today we announced the partnership between Salesforce.com and Adobe. The new offering, Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is a jointly developed IDE that provides a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based RIAs, which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser using Adobe Flash Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR. This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform.

As a developer, you'll be able to get a combined Force.com and Flash Builder tool so you never have to switch environments to create Flex applications on top of the Force.com platform. The new tool exposes a new project type, the Force.com stratus type, and lets you automatically connect your applications to the Force.com platform using a WSDL file. Then you can use the data features of Flash Builder to connect your data in the cloud with Flex components. It also has support out of the box for creating AIR applications that support online/offline synchronization and LiveCycle Data Services integration.

You can check out the video below for some getting started information. There is also a fantastic Force.com quickstart on Adobe's Developer Connection and a lot of other information on the Force.com section of Devnet. Finally there will be a live webinar on November 3rd with James Ward and Markus Spohn where you can see a demo and then ask questions about how it all fits together.

The new tool and the partnership really simplify the process of connecting your Flex apps to the Force.com platform so that you can focus more time on building a really great user interface that exposes those services. We're looking forward to seeing what kinds of applications you create with the Flash Platform and Force.com.