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Salesforce.com has announced that they will be launching Visualforce, which it describes as “User-Interface-as-a-Service,” as part of the company’s “Summer ‘08” release. I spoke with Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce earlier today to get the skinny on this buzzword laden news, and while business software may not be our MO here at Mashable, Visualforce is something to pay attention to, as it’s potentially a technology that could be emulated by platforms far and wide.
User Interface as a Service
[img src="http://i27.tinypic.com/i290lk.gif" caption="" credit="" alt=""]“User Interface as a Service” (UIaaS) is essentially what the title implies: versus building a UI from scratch, Visualforce allows developers to utilize pre-built components to create their UI within Salesforce applications. In case you're not familiar with Salesforce, their platform, AppExchange, is like the Facebook Platform for business software, but with more users, and with some serious money involved.
For a simple example of UIaaS in action, if you wanted to include in your company’s implementation of Salesforce a Google Map showing where your customers are located, that would be a pre-built component that could be added to your account by simply adding a single tag. For a more complex example, Kelman demonstrated a completely customized version of Salesforce where Dolby (the sound company) is using Salesforce to track which sound platform various theatres around the country are using, with a graphical UI totally different from the standard Salesforce.com. According to Salesforce, UIaaS Components can consist of:
* Pages – this capability enables the design definition of an application’s user interface.
* Components – this provides the ability to create new applications that automatically match the look and feel of Salesforce applications or easily customize and extend the Salesforce user interface to specific customer and user requirements.
* Apex Controllers - The controller enables customers to build any user interface behavior.
* Static Resources - Provides the capability to easily create, reference, and manage the assets used to create UIs—including images, style sheets, JavaScript libraries, and other browser components.
* Inline Page and Controller Editing - In Visualforce development mode, customers can edit Visualforce pages and Apex controllers directly from the runtime view of any page.
Component Developer Ecosystem
Meanwhile, there’s already a bit of an ecosystem behind Visualforce; developers can build components and either sell them to other users or offer them as open source through Salesforce’s popular AppExchange. So far, Salesforce claims more than 4,000 developers and 11,000 customer interfaces in the preview program for Visualforce.
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