Force.com is the preeminent on-demand application development platform in use today, supporting some 47,000+ organizations. Individual enterprises and commercial software-as-as-service (SaaS) vendors trust the platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. To meet the extreme demands of its large user population, Force.com’s foundation is a metadata-driven software architecture that enables multitenant applications. This paper explains the patented technology that makes the Force.com platform fast, scalable and secure for any type of application.
History has shown that every so often, incremental advances in technology and changes in business models create major paradigm shifts in the way software applications are designed, built, and delivered to end users. The invention of personal computers (PCs), computer networking, and graphical user interfaces (UIs) gave rise to the adoption of client/server applications over expensive, inflexible, character-mode mainframe applications. Today, reliable broadband Internet access, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and the cost inefficiencies of managing dedicated on-premises applications are driving a transition toward the delivery of decomposable, managed, shared, Web-based services called software as a service (SaaS).