"We are excited that salesforce.com continues to help Eclipse developers embrace the ease and flexibility of the on-demand model," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Bringing together the sophistication of Eclipse with the power of salesforce.com's popular Apex Web services API and on-demand platform is a win-win for developers."

To spur development with Apex, salesforce.com also is providing comprehensive developer resources, including new Apex developer toolkits for AJAX and Eclipse and a new Wiki-based developer site, the Apex Developer Network (ADN) at http://developer.salesforce.com. ADN provides the community, tools and resources to let developers use the Apex programming language to build new applications for the AppExchange. Now any developer in the world -- with access to just a Web browser and Internet connection -- can harness the power of the world's most popular multi-tenant platform to create new applications and mashups from scratch. With toolkits and resources for most popular development languages, including AJAX, Java, .NET and PHP, developers can also combine those applications with other Web services to create new business mashups, allowing developers, ISVs and IT organizations to easily leverage The Business Web in their projects and offerings.

* New Apex Toolkit for Eclipse : Built on the popular Eclipse development platform framework, the new Toolkit extends Eclipse beyond traditional software development and provides developers with a robust development and debugging environment to create Apex Code. In addition, with the toolkit, developers can directly access and explore the Apex data model and objects, extend Apex's native Web presentation capabilities, and build and debug applications and mashups that use the popular Apex AJAX toolkit.

* New AJAX Toolkit : The popular AJAX Toolkit for creating business mashups between Salesforce and other systems, like Google Maps or Skype's VoIP service, has been updated to support the new Apex API capabilities, integrate with other AJAX frameworks and provide greater speed and responsiveness.

* New Developer Apex Wiki : As part of the Apex Developer Network, a new developer Wiki with documentation, demos, sample code and tools is available at http://developer.salesforce.com . The Wiki allows any member of the ADN community to get the resources they need to build apps using Apex Code, and contribute back their samples and examples.