CLOUD DEVELOPMENT
Platform as a Service: Google and Force.com
Tom Nolle, Contributor
05.14.2009
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Since cloud computing is often thought of as "platform as a service," it is important to understand what the boundaries of the term "platform" might be. Some might call it "infrastructure as a service" instead, but that is equally vague and adds little to the overall understanding of what cloud resources might look like. When discussing clouds such as the Force.com cloud and Google's App Engine, for example, the "resources" of the cloud include more than just hardware and an operating system. They contain "middleware," which manages the connections between the software and the cloud, and database tools. This makes them easier to use with the applications they target, but it can also decrease their versatility if the software is taken beyond its range.
Salesforce.com's Force.com cloud is designed to integrate with Salesforce.com's application tools. The cloud is built on Salesforce.com's Apex On-Demand Platform and the Apex language is used to create hosted applications. There are also toolkits available to integrate client-side applications, developed using any popular programming language, with Apex-based hosted components. An Apex "sandbox" is also available to develop and test applications. While Apex is a Salesforce language, it is similar in syntax to Java or C#, and most developers report little difficulty in learning and using the language. Developers can list their completed applications on Salesforce AppExchange.
There is no requirement that Apex applications integrate with Salesforce.com services, but that has been an obvious focus. The majority of non-Salesforce applications are those with special interest to the Salesforce community, but there are applications that do not connect to Salesforce in either a customer relationship management (CRM) or a business and marketing sense. Force.com Edition is the platform that provides for custom hosting on the cloud, and there is a per-user per-month charge for this service in addition to th...
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