Starting Salesforce Development

Salesforce Introduction

Salesforce is primarily a customer relationship management (CRM) product. Salesforce can be broken down into following components.

Salesforce1
The Salesforce1 Platform brings together Salesforce.com, Force.com, Heroku, and ExactTarget into one family of cloud services.

Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the primary enterprise offering within the Salesforce1 Platform, and provides companies with an interface for case management and task management, and a system for automatically routing and escalating important events.

Force.com
Force.com is a platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to create multitenant add-on applications that integrate into the main Salesforce.com application. Force.com applications are hosted on Salesforce.com's infrastructure.
Force.com applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for Force.com) and Visualforce (an XML syntax typically used to generate HTML). The Force.com platform receives three complete releases a year. As the platform is provided as a service to its developers, every single development instance also receives all these updates.

Work.com
Work.com facilitates collaboration and shared contribution to individual, team, and organizational goals, and facilitates the exchange of feedback anonymously and publicly between peers and managers.

AppExchange
Launched in 2005, the Salesforce AppExchange is an online application marketplace for third-party applications that run on the Force.com platform. Applications are available for free, as well as yearly or monthly subscription models.

Technologies

The following technologies form the base of Salesforce.

Apex
Apex is a proprietary programming language provided by the Force.com platform to developers similar to Java. It is a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language, following a dot-notation and curly-brackets syntax. Apex can be used to execute programmed functions during most processes on the Force.com platform including custom buttons and links, event handlers on record creation, updates or deletions and via the custom controllers of Visualforce pages.

Visualforce
Visualforce is the view control technology on the Force.com platform. It is an open/close tag based library with structure and markup very similar to HTML. Visualforce can be used to create entire custom pages inside a Salesforce organisation in conjunction with many other front end technologies, such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. One of the key benefits of Visualforce is tight coupling to native features of the platform, such as controller methods and data access, that would not typically be available to other front end technologies.

Lightning
Lightning App Builder is user for rapid application development of responsive web interfaces.

About me

I have been working on Salesforce platform for over 4 years. I have vast experience in third party integrations , Canvas, Lightening, Salesforce1, Webservices. I am a certified 401 Salesforce Developer.
In my blogs I am going to walk you through some common problems faced by new as well as experienced developers. I will be sharing tips and tricks to work around Salesforce limitations and Third party integrations.