Chapter 1. Welcome to the Force Platform

Building and running business applications with traditional software has always been too complex, slow, and expensive. A new model, called cloud computing, has emerged over the last decade to address this problem. Applications that run in the cloud are delivered as a service so companies no longer have to buy and maintain hardware and software to run them.

Salesforce.com pioneered this model with our applications business over the last decade. More recently, we’ve opened up our infrastructure and made it available for anyone building any business application and running it on our servers using our platform—the Force Platform.

The Force Platform allows you to store structured data, implement business logic with workflow rules, approval processes and custom code, support Web browsers and mobile devices, integrate with other applications, do reporting and analytics and scale up or down—all with subsecond response time, high availability, and security you need to run your mission critical business apps.

Companies and ISVs are using the Force Platform to build everything from supply chain management to, billing, audit, tax calculation, event management, compliance tracking, brand management, pricing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, billing, HR, payment processing, employee on-boarding, claims processing, and many others.

The Force Platform is the fastest path to building complex enterprise apps. What used to take months can now be done in days or weeks. Unlike a stack of separately designed hardware and software products, the Force Platform speeds innovation through a powerful yet easy-to-use development and deployment model. Users easily assemble applications then instantly deploy them to the salesforce.com infrastructure.

The book you are reading is intended to be a rich introduction to the breadth and depth of the Force Platform. As a developer, you can use this book to provide a solid framework for achieving your goals on the platform.

This first chapter serves as an introduction—to cloud computing, the Force Platform, the application you will build through the course of this book, and the process used to maximize your learning effort.