Salesforce Keeps Tight Control On Cloud DevelopmentSalesforce Keeps Tight Control On Cloud Development

Salesforce.com continues to expand its Force.com cloud platform, where customers may go not only to customize their Salesforce CRM applications but to build entirely new ones.

"What we offer is significantly different from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You don't upload to us a machine image," a virtualized workload known as an Amazon Machine Image, said Dave Carroll, Force.com developer evangelist and author of the original Force.com integrated development environment. He addressed a session at EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara Wednesday.

"We've taken our platform on which we built our successful CRM applications and exposed it to outside developers," he told a roomful of developers and architects. The multitenant nature of the platform becomes something that the outside developer can take advantage of. Gartner analysts have called Force.com "an application server layout" in the cloud, or a way to get application server services outside your own premises.

An application can meet radically scaled-up demand because the application server groups the requests coming in to it and maintains the state of those requests as the application does its work. A developer using Force.com can use specific resources of the platform without worrying about contention with other developers or having his application crowded out by somebody else's server needs. The platform will provide an elastic environment for his application, regardless of the number of its users.

Independent software vendors have used the Force.com platform to build accounting's general ledger applications. They've built recruiting, departmental expense reporting, call center support, and mobile field force technical support applications, he said. These types of applications thrive in the cloud environment. Users can log into their services, regardless of location.

Carroll explained that at the heart of Force.com development services is a centralized database. The first task presented to a developer is to define a data model, using the Force.com wizard, which doesn't require him to be a database architect to do so. "The database is at the core of the application. We provide all the accoutrements around the database," he said.

Developers may then use VisualForce, Salesforce's language for building the HTLM presentation that will reach the end user. VisualForce in some ways resembles Microsoft's Active Server Pages, .Net technology, and Java Server Pages. Force.com developers may also add Adobe Apex logic statements to their applications. Apex will seem familiar to programmers used to working with C++ or Java, he said.

The platform also provides source-code storage and version control.

There are many features that Salesforce is considering adding, but Carroll said development in the cloud must occur within a constrained environment. If outside developers are going to use the features of the platform, Salesforce must make sure they don't do so in such a way that threatens its continued operations.

"We needed to assert extreme control over the code we're going to run," he explained. "Our main motivation is to maintain rigid control over the platform."

If that sounds hostile to the free range of options that developers typically prefer, that's the trade-off for the advantages of developing in the cloud. The platform has built-in governors and limits. If a program loop runs more than 40,000 times in one session, Force.com will shut it down; ditto, if a single session demands processing of more than 1,000 XML statements.

Salesforce is concerned about turning prospective customers away from its platform, but "it's as much a concern that an accidental programming mistake" will impact the cloud's ongoing operation.

Nevertheless, Salesforce hopes to add many additional developer features to the Force.com platform in the future, such as a capability to build a workflow pattern via a drag-and-drop palette.

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