What is the Force Platform?
,Cloud computing, based on the amount of recent coverage, may seem like a brand new development, but salesforce.com has been delivering applications from the cloud for almost a decade. The Force Platform supports almost 50,000 customers, containin more than 1 million individual subscribers, running enterprise applications offered by salesforce.com, its associated independent software vendors (ISVs) and in-house and independent developers. There are more than 70,000 custom applications running on the Force Platform at the time of this writing in 2008, and the platform supports more than 150 million transactions a day.
The Force Platform is different from more traditional platforms, as shown in the diagram above. A traditional platform supplies only the core services of database access and containers for logic and presentation. You have to use other software to create your entire application, as well as the additional components to run the data center which supports the platform. Of course, additional components means additional expenditure, for acquisition, maintenance and integration.
With the Force Platform, you get a complete stack, including a complete user interface to your data, full reporting and analytic capabilities, a flexible security and sharing model, and other services not displayed in the diagram, such as workflow and approvals, fully available and integrated from the outset. You can even leverage extended features such as built-in internationalization, full support for mobile devices, and integration with existing systems, all of which are beyond the scope of this book.
You access the Force Platform through a Web browser, as shown in the figure below.
The page shown above is not only a standard Force Platform page, but also the interface to one method of developing on the Force Platform, since you both develop from and deploy to the cloud. The platform itself provides everything you need to create robust applications through a combination of clicks, components and code. This phrase provides the key to understanding the productivity benefits of the Force Platform, with functionality coming from simple declarations of attributes, through the use of pre-built functionality and extending to a fully flexible development environment, when necessary.
The platform includes a rich depth of functionality that you can include in your applications with a few simple clicks to use the capabilities of the platform. You can define your data structures and their relationships, expose user interfaces to interact with this data, extend the internal data with logical representations of data and define workflow actions, and approval processes, all through shaping the built-in capabilities of the platform through setting the values of attributes.
The entire Force Platform reporting and analytics system is an automatic part of all your applications, giving you the ability to extract value from your data store through integrated functionality.
Metadata – the key to the Force PlatformAs a developer, you may be feeling a bit cynical about all these fantastic claims for the Force Platform cloud computing platform. The description almost sounds too good to be true—how can you get all of this functionality without any code at all? The answer lies in a single word—metadata. When you shape the built-in functionality of the platform, you are actually creating metadata, which is used by the Force Platform to dictate the runtime operations of your organization. Just as a database schema imposes certain rules on the data that can be stored in a database table, Force Platform metadata guides the execution of any and all Force Platform applications. Because the Force Platform uses metadata to create and control your applications, you can also see the effects of your development efforts immediately. When you change the metadata for an application, your have actually changed the application’s runtime behavior, so you can immediately access the application to see the effects of your changes. |
The default capabilities of the Force Platform are truly deep and rich, but you get even more with the platform. The Force Platform includes a language, Apex, which gives you the ability to transparently supplement the functionality of the platform, as well as Visualforce technology, which implements a model-view-controller interface to the platform providing complete flexibility in defining user interfaces and data access. You can create reusable logical components with Apex classes, as well as user interface components with Visualforce – both of which can be used to increase your developer productivity even more through reuse of those components.
Throughout the remainder of this book, you will use the different aspects of the Force Platform to develop an application, during which you will come to profoundly understand the power presented by the Force Platform.