Application Development

Unlimited Power to Innovate—on Demand

Just like the changes that moved publishing technology from paper to bits, making it possible for us to have information about anything in the world right at our fingertips, the move to on-demand applications is making it possible to imagine robust, enterprise-class applications for almost any business need.

The Force.com platform provides the tools to enable a new era of on-demand applications that bring the power and success of Salesforce to your whole company—not just sales, service, and marketing. Entirely new types of innovation are now possible through a combination of “no programming” point-and-click wizards, toolkits for the most popular development languages for creating client-side applications, and the Apex programming language. Because the resulting applications will run natively on the Force.com platform, developers can take advantage of:

  • All the benefits of multitenancy, including built-in security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease of use.
  • Out-of-the-box features that will speed development, including analytics, offline access, and mobile deployment.
  • Freedom from managing and maintaining any server infrastructure, even as applications scale to tens of thousands of users.
  • Participation in a community of thousands of Apex developers.
  • The ability to reach thousands of salesforce.com customers more easily than ever via the AppExchange marketplace.

By eliminating problems specific to traditional application development, the on-demand model frees developers to focus on developing solutions that deliver real business value. The Force.com platform allows IT to innovate while saving the costs and headaches associated with servers, individual software solutions, middleware or point-to-point connections, upgrades, and the staff needed to manage it all.

Customer Relationship Survey Result
78% increased customer satisfaction

Point. Click. Create.

Unique to the Force.com platform is a point-and-click approach to creating applications. Programming knowledge is no longer necessary to create new applications. With just a Web browser, business users, administrators, and developers can define the metadata that results in the “blueprint” for an application, including the data model, objects, forms, workflows, and more.

 

Go with What You Know

When you need to integrate with other systems or create mash-ups with external services, developers can use the Force.com Web Services API in combination with toolkits for the most popular development languages—including Java, VB.NET, C#, .NET, or open-source languages—to create highly visual and interactive applications. By using the Force.com API, developers can directly access all data stored in their Force.com platform applications.

 

Want to Speak Our Language?

With the Apex programming language, developers have the most granular control ever to create almost any kind of on-demand application and to do everything from customizing objects to creating new buttons to writing completely new applications from scratch. With Apex, entire new behaviors and business logic can be developed with code that runs directly on salesforce.com’s servers. That way, developers are freed from having to own or manage servers and infrastructure, and they get the same power and flexibility to create on-demand applications as salesforce.com’s own R&D staff.

 
 

The features of the Force.com platform and the Apex programming language dramatically expand the reach, scope, and depth of applications that can be developed for internal use or made available to the salesforce.com community through the AppExchange marketplace.