eBay DevCon 08 - Wed18 10:30 force.com & eBay - Building apps in the Cloud

This speak was presented by Dave Carrol, Principal Developer Evangelist, Salesforce.com.

By the way, there is a difference between force.com and salesforce.com. Force.com is the software platform which provides the services used by all the salesforces.com applications. Some of the services included in the force.com platform include, database, infrastructure, integration, logic, user interface and application exchange; all of those provided as a service.

Salesforce business is based on SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service, and offers a multitude of basic and advanced services that one can use to integrate and build your own application.

Their infrastructure scales horizontally in a so-called Pod Architecture, with mirrored database clusters and app servers in 3 data-centers in US. The database service offers 8,700,00+ customizations and 160,000 SQL statements per sec allowing the user to create tables, add fields, build relationship, automatic backups etc.

The Web Services SOAP API handles 1.75 billion API calls per month with a lifetime 28+ billion total API calls.

There is an Apex code which is a language that allow users to program a logic which is compiled and run in the server. The integration of this language has some specific database relation, like triggers for example, and is transactional. It is not a general language, but it has a Java-like instance, strongly typed, transactional, schema-aware and secured (no endless loops allowed). It is also possible a higher level of development based on declarative logic (point and click) and formula-based logic (similar to excel).

Dave finished his presentation by showing the development platform (based on Eclipse) and creating a simple application using the web interface provided by the salesforce platform.

Here is the link to the presentation.