Development as a service

Salesforce.com has announced Force.com Development-as-a-Service, a new set of development tools and APIs that enable developers to harness the promise of cloud computing. It provides access to the database, logic and user interface capabilities of the Force.com platform. Development-as-a-Service includes the new Metadata API, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Sandbox, and Code Share to provide developers with a set of services to build enterprise Software-as-a-Service applications. The IDE is built on Eclipse and provides a means to manage all standard development tasks, such as project views, HTML composition and rich code editing with error tracking.

With Code Share, developers across organisations – or around the world – can collaborate on the development, testing and deployment of their applications. Integrating with most standards-based source control management systems, Code Share lets developers store the definitions of their Force.com applications in source control, and deploy those applications in either their Force.com Sandbox or production environments. It also works with open source communities, including project hosting on Google Code.