Summer is here to stay! The archived Summer '09 Release Preview webinar is now available, and it spills the beans on all the new features available in the Summer '09 Release Preview. You can also read about them on the Summer '09 Release Preview Page.

We move with the times here on Developer Force, and as a result have given our entire Developer Force site a face lift! Quite a few things have changed, all for the better, making the site easier to navigate, making information easier to find, and making it all easier on the eye as well! Check out the new home page, the completely revamped Technical Library and all the ancillary parts of our sites such as Ideas, Code Share and the Discussion Boards to see it all in action! We look forward to your feedback.

An environment (also known as an organization) is an instance of the Force.com platform that lets you access, deploy or create applications with various feature sets, depending on the configuration of the environment. This article introduces this powerful notion that underlies developing and deploying in the cloud, examines the various types of environments that are used for production, development and testing, and looks at best practices and limits of each type of environment.

This archived webinar replay provides an in-depth look at building Visualforce components. Custom Visualforce components let you augment the built-in set of components with your own components that encapsulate presentation, data and logic. The webinar walks you through component creation, shows how to use strongly typed attributes to parameterize components, and provides a number of compelling examples along the way.

Apex Managed Sharing allows you to use Apex Code to build sophisticated and dynamic data sharing settings that aren’t otherwise possible. For example, a developer can use Apex Managed Sharing to write a trigger that will automatically share a database record with a user that has been specified in a lookup field. This article examines the architecture of Apex Managed Sharing, looks at the Apex Code that needs to be written to create a share, and provides a sample implementation.

Mobile Visualforce pages can easily be rendered on Force.com Mobile as a way of enhancing the client with your own screens.  This article shows you how to build custom user interfaces for the iPhone which have that characteristic iPhone look and feel.  The article makes use of the iUI CSS framework and provides a lot of code samples to get you going with your own applications.

Grails Force.com Plugin is an open source rapid application development tool for Force.com, which provides seamless integration between Grails and Force.com. The plugin utilizes the Force.com partner WSDL to describe and create a local application domain model from all objects defined within your environment.

This Visualforce component adds a rich-text editor to your component palette. Use it to add advanced text editing features to text areas on Visualforce pages.

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