A Platform-as-a-Service development environment delivered on Salesforce.com - the platform is more correctly referred to as Force.com. A dedicated Salesforce Stack Exchange is available for all your Salesforce questions at https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/
Salesforce often refers to the Sales Cloud (CRM), Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget), or Force.com (cloud platform) products that Salesforce.com (an enterprise cloud computing company) offers. It is also considered to be PaaS (Platform as a Service) that extends the kind of solutions(Customizations) that it can offer. Heroku is also a part of the greater Salesforce Platform, but for clarity, Heroku-related questions should use the heroku tag.
Sales Cloud Enterprise or Unlimited Edition and Force.com support a proprietary programming language called Apex (similar to Java) and a markup language called Visualforce (similar to JavaServer Faces) for creating interfaces or pages. Also, with the release of the Salesforce UI known as the Lightning Experience, Salesforce development can use Lightning Components, which fit into a UI framework technology based on the open-source Aura. Querying the back-end database occurs through the Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL, similar to SQL), while data manipulation in Apex occurs through the Data Manipulation Language (DML).
There is also a set of Api's available for accessing Salesforce services from external applications, namely:
- Rest Api - provides access to data and descriptions of some org metadata
- Soap Api - provides similar functionality to the Rest Api
- Metadata Api - used for deploying code and configuration changes to a salesforce org. There are existing deployment tools available, but this api allows the possibility of creating your own.
- Tooling Api - for making individual changes to org metadata.
- Bulk Api - for working with large amounts of data.
Salesforce applications can be created without coding. A description of the data types is enough to generate a basic user interface for interacting with the data, and the platform allows behavior to be described using formulas and workflows. Apex and Visualforce are used to program more complex behavior.
Since questions which relate primarily to the declarative side (i.e. clicks not code) of Salesforce development do not belong on Stack Overflow, the Salesforce Stack Exchange is now live, with the intention of providing a forum for such questions.
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