Why Visualforce?

As you have seen, you can create powerful and flexible applications for the Force Platform with simply declarative methods. The Force Platform applications you create with these methods are fully functional and robust, although there are some limitations to the features of those applications. For instance, you can use a variety of different user interface styles, such as text fields, text boxes or picklists, to display fields in a standardized page, but you cannot create pages outside of that standardized look-and-feel. More importantly, the user interfaces you create implement standard functionality automatically, but you cannot necessarily change the ways that these user interfaces interact with Force Platform data, or implement a particular task. For instance, pages are automatically created for each object in the Force Platform database, but you cannot create a page that allows users to edit data from more than one object on a single page.

Visualforce technology provides a means for developers to create any type of browser-based user interface, interacting with any combination of data, in your on-demand Force Platform applications. You can create user interfaces with a simple tag-based syntax, similar to HTML, which accesses one or more Force Platform objects.

Visualforce gives you this flexibility while still using all the power embedded in the metadata you have defined for your Force Platform objects—truly the best of both worlds.