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It is important to note that the many custom applications built on the platform don’t just operate within a Force.com environment—by using the Force.com Web services API to integrate these applications with existing systems, customers are making more than one billion Force.com API transactions per month.
Force.com Platform Architecture
To understand the Force.com platform, it is useful to understand two of its key technologies— multi-tenancy and metadata.
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy is a key salesforce.com innovation that’s at the heart of Force.com. Multi-tenant applications are designed so that users share the same physical instance and version of the application. Individual “deployments” of those applications occupy virtual partitions rather than separate physical stacks of hardware and software. In contrast, traditional client/server (single tenant) architectures require an entire stack of hardware and software to be dedicated to each application deployment. Each stack component must be purchased and maintained, including networking, hardware, operating system, database, and application components. Each stack in such architectures also requires its own intricate maintenance, management and upgrade routines. The unpredictable interaction between these components can further add to the associated costs.
In contrast to their single-tenant counterparts, multi-tenant applications also make possible clear boundaries between the platform and the applications that run on it. Although applications have their own data objects, forms, layouts, and integrations, these and other customizations are managed as abstractions. This separation is key to ensuring that any given application can’t “behave badly” by encroaching on other users’ applications.
Multi-tenant business applications such as Salesforce are similar to consumer applications such as Google Mail that also run a single code base and depend on an infrastructure shared by all users. It is this multi-tenant architecture that makes possible the quick deployment, low risk, and rapid innovation for which salesforce.com has become known.
Metadata
A second key Force.com technology is metadata, which makes it possible to create applications not just by code, but with collections of metadata. When developers create these elements for their applications, their work is captured as meta-data ‘blueprints,” which Force.com then automatically translates into the full applications that end users experience.
One of the advantages of this model is that, by using simple point-and-click configuration, it becomes possible to create sophisticated applications without code. As a result, metadata lets users unfamiliar with programming actually create applications, while it speeds development for experienced programmers.
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