I've got to course-correct on an implementation I'm looking to build.  I've got an embedded SWF in our SF instance that uses the Google Maps API for Flex and is a positive feedback loop into Location data that's stored in SF.  It works really well and is pretty quick.  The Product Management team is excited about adding Google Earth KML overlays to this map.  The Google Maps API for Flex doesn't have great support for parsing KML but they're getting there slowly.  I've looked at a couple of different interfaces for the KML/KMZ file and Google Earth sharing.   One approach I took that is not working so well is to load the KML at time of loading of the SWF.  I've hosted the KML out on Box.net.  I'm a paying Box.net customer so the download begins immediately when attempting to load the file using the URLLoader class.  The download takes a long time, though, and is causing URLLoader to time out (the default setting is 15 seconds and even at home with High-speed internet connection this is taking longer than 15 seconds).

Is there a way to access Salesforce static resources in a Flex swf?  I would guess that I would still use URLLoader but maybe use the $ syntax for Static Resources?  By doing this I could offload the burden of downloading the file from a public internet location and presumably speed things up.  It doesn't make sense for me to incur a hit downloading the file each time a location is accessed.

I spent some time on the webinar last week trying to understand what new features would be available in Summer '09.  One that piqued my interest was Batch Apex.  Ideally, I'd like to blend with the feature above and update the static resource with realtime data on a scheduled (or ad hoc if necessary) basis