Project Selection

Some projects are better suited to implementation on Force.com than others. Running into natural limits of the PaaS approach or battling against the abstraction provided by the platform is possible. Always strive to pursue projects that play into Force.com strengths. No absolute rules exist for determining this, but projects with the following characteristics tend to work well with Force.com:

The project is data centered, requiring the storage and retrieval of structured data.

Structured data is the most important point. Implementing a YouTube-like application on Force.com is not the best idea because it primarily works with unstructured data in the form of video streams. Force.com supports binary data, so a video-sharing Web site is certainly possible to build. But handling large amounts of binary data is not a focus or core competency of Force.com. A hotel reservation system is an example of a more natural fit.

The user interface is composed primarily of wizards, grids, forms, and reports.

Force.com does not restrict you to these user interface patterns. You can implement any type of user interface, including “rich” clients that run using Flash in the browser, and even full desktop applications that integrate with Force.com via its Apex Web Services API. But to capture the most benefit from the platform, stick with structured, data-driven user interfaces that use standard Web technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript.

The underlying business processes involve email, spreadsheets, threaded discussions, and hierarchies of people who participate in a distributed, asynchronous workflow.

Standard Force.com features such as Chatter, workflow, approvals, and email services add a lot of value to these applications. They can be configured by business analysts or controlled in depth by developers.

The rules around data sharing and security are fine-grained and based on organizational roles and user identity.

User identity management and security are deep subjects and typically require high effort to implement in a custom system. With Force.com, they are standard, highly configurable components that you can leverage without coding. You can then spend more time thinking through the “who can see what” scenarios rather than coding the infrastructure to make them possible.

The project requires integration with other systems.

Force.com is built from the ground up to interoperate with other systems at all its layers: data, business logic, and user interface. The infrastructure is taken care of, so you can focus on the integration design. Exchange a million rows of data between your SQL Server database and Force.com. Call your Apex services from a legacy J2EE application or vice versa. Add an event to a Google calendar from within your Visualforce user interface. These scenarios and more are fully supported by the platform.

The project manipulates data incrementally, driven by user actions rather than a calendar.

Force.com is a shared resource. Simultaneously, other customers of varying sizes are using the same infrastructure. This requires Force.com to carefully monitor and fairly distribute the computing resources so that all customers can accomplish their goals with a high quality of service. If one customer’s application on Force.com was allowed to consume a disproportionate share of resources, other customers’ applications would suffer resource starvation. The limitations in place, called governors, prevent too much memory, CPU, disk, or network bandwidth from being concentrated in the hands of any one customer. The platform strongly enforces these governor limits, so the best Force.com applications involve computing tasks that can be split into small units of work.

The data volume is limited, below a few million records per table.

Data volume is important to think about with any system: How large is my data going to grow and at what rate? Force.com consists of a logical single transactional database. No analytical data store exists. Applications that require access to large volumes of data, such as data warehousing and analytics, cannot be built on Force.com. Other software vendors such as GoodData provide solutions in this area, but all involve copying data from Force.com to their own products.

Force.com is not an all-or-nothing proposition. If your project does not fit within these guidelines, you might still want to explore Force.com but in conjunction with other PaaS solutions such as Heroku. Thanks to Force.com’s integration capabilities, Heroku and Force.com can be used together as a composite solution, with Heroku augmenting Force.com where general-purpose computing is needed.