Summary

This chapter has covered the basics of Visualforce. Visualforce is a challenging but rewarding area of the Force.com platform, enabling the development of custom, data-intensive Web user interfaces using high-level languages for both logic and presentation. Mastering Visualforce requires the application of all of your Force.com skills and knowledge: the database, security model, and Apex code.

Use this chapter as a jumping-off point to the online documentation and Visualforce Developer’s Guide. The Visualforce Developer’s Guide contains the most current and complete information on the standard Visualforce view components.

Before moving on to the next chapter, consider what you’ve learned about Visualforce:

A strong distinction exists between the controller and the page. No business logic is allowed on the page.

The state of your pages at runtime is maintained automatically by Force.com. This enables you to design stateful interactions across one or many pages without writing custom state transfer code, assuming you always use Visualforce action components rather than raw HTML tags such as anchors.

Custom controller code runs as the system user by default, meaning record-level security is not honored.