At the bit SalesForce.com conference was announced a new programming language, with backing from Adobe and others. “This is the most important announcement Salsforce.com ever made,’ Marc Benioff, SalesForce.com chairman and CEO, told those attending its annual user conference.” Apex is for delivery to a SalesForce.com server, rather that to the general Web audience, or a particular intranet’s HTTP server. SalesForce.com already has initiatives with Flash, Breeze, Acrobat and so on… good possibilities here, but it will in the Saleforce.com audience base.
The First On-Demand Programming Language represents a powerful new tool for developers interested in building the next generation of business applications. With Apex, a whole new breed of on demand applications is possible, featuring sophisticated processes and business logic, entirely on demand and without software. Likewise, Apex will enable unprecedented levels of customization, allowing you to modify the behavior of existing features, or create entirely new ones. And like other customizations built on the platform, Apex apps can be packaged and shared through the AppExchange directory.
The key technology of Apex is a new programming language that allows developers to do something entirely new and powerful to run business logic on SalesForce.com.com servers. With the release of this language, Apex developers will be able to use the same tolls that SalesForce.com.com’s own development team uses to build our own apps, including our flagship CRM product. Before Apex, it was possible to do some impressive things with Ajax or other on-server code. But because Ape code runs natively on the server, it is faster and more powerful, can interact with the UI via Buttons and Events, and can manipulate data through the API. Transactions and flow control can now be efficiently done on the server side, opening u new possibilities for developers.
The Apex language, combined with powerful new platform technologies like custom buttons, outbound communications, and inline s-controls, means that it is possible to put code, and therefore business logic, almost anywhere in the UI. Expanding functionality within applications, as well as adding wholly new features, is easier than ever.
ApexConnect will provide connectors for applications such as Office, Outlook, Lotus Notes, SAP R3 and Oracle 11i. ConnectOracle, which offers a built template designed to speed the integration process between SalesForce.com and Oracle 11i, enables Oracle 11i customers to access their SalesForce.com front office and back-office customer data.
SalesForce.com expects ConnectOracle to be available early next year, for an annual fee of $12,000 to users of SalesForce.com Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition. The company recently released its ConnectSAP for integrating SalesForce.com with SAP R3. ApexConnct will also become a category on the SalesForce.com AppExchange, which serves as a marketplace for hosted applications from more than 230 partners.
Apex has been compared to Java, and maybe that’s not accurate. But if not, how is Apex different? And why wouldn’t a developer just use Java? What’s different about Apex is that it is an on-demand programming language. By that mean that if a developer is using the sales force automation (software) he obviously can get up and running, and he don’t have to buy the hardware. The same thing is true with Apex: any developer can start programming.
What’s different about Apex is it’s running in the database, basically – it is actually running on application servers. And one of the key things a developer can do with Apex and can’t be done with Web services is the developer can have transactional control of the database. But the other thing, in terms of a language, is it’s really, really easy to use to write the logic, the business logic that needs to happen within the service… The developer can create these really complex applications really quickly.
