Salesforce.com unveils Apex development environment
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2007 12:00:00 AM
In a technology preview of Salesforce.com's new Apex programming language for developing applications against its on-demand environment, the customer relationship management (CRM) vendor also unveiled an Eclipse-based tool kit to familiarize developers with the prerelease language.
Actually, Apex isn't really new. Salesforce.com has long relied on it as the language for writing its own CRM applications and building its on-demand environment. But now the vendor is making it publicly available to others who want to write applications that execute in the Salesforce.com on-demand environment.
According to Adam Gross, VP of developer marketing, Apex is very similar to the stored procedure languages that emerged with relational databases back in the 1980s and '90s. “It should be very familiar to SQL developers,” he maintains.
The idea behind stored procedures is to write application logic that resides inside the database, as opposed to Java or a 4GL that executes from outside the database. The difference on this go-round is that besides using the database environment for tasks such as transactional integrity or rollback, Apex also handles the housekeeping associated with running an application in a multi-tenant environment—without impeding another customer's installation.
According to Gross, Apex should be simpler than the stored procedure languages such as that of Oracle or others, which were mostly written in the 1980s.
The Eclipse-based tooling that parallels the release of the Apex preview should provide a ready on-ramp for Java developers accustomed to the Eclipse shell, with potential tie-ins to other Eclipse tooling that handles various aspects of the software development life cycle.
The release of Apex is the latest step in Salesforce.com's strategy to evolve from hosted CRM applications to a full-blown on-demand platform. Previous steps—such as the creation of AppExchange—put forth a marketplace for third-party applications to run in the Salesforce.com on-demand environment. This makes it possible for customers to take advantage of the on-demand features without having to buy the CRM solution.
At this point, Salesforce has not disclosed when Apex will officially enter general availability.
