Development Experience

Many features of the platform combine to contribute to the quality of the developer's experience. The foundational elements are:

• The ability to interactively Manage Platform Objects.
• The ability to create JSP Pages that can be used in a wide variety of ways.

But many other features contribute to the experience, as well.

Development Environment

Installing the Eclipse Plug-In makes it easier to edit JSP pages and Java classes (whose methods may be also invoked in Data Policies).

APIs

You can take advantage of multiple APIs:

• Java API
• REST API
• AJAX and REST

Components

To make your pages stand out, you can:

• Upload images, CSS files and JavaScript files as Static Resources, and access them in your pages.
• Create Custom Components
• Use any component in the jQuery library.

Unit Testing

The Unit Test Framework makes it possible to run tests on one class at a time, or on all classes defined in your tenancy.

Platform Capabilities

A wide variety of other features makes it easier to develop and customize applications:

• Composite Objects to modify a set of related objects in a single transaction
• Data Policies to automatically carry out pre-defined actions for selected events
• Form Layouts, both default and custom, you can use to see and enter record data
• Packages to deploy applications
• Picklists, Global Picklists, and Lookup relationships
• Reports to create summaries
• Search to find things
• Sites to harness the power of the platform in outward-facing pages
• Views to see lists of records
• Web Forms to interact with the platform from other sites
• Workflows to help model business processes