Credit Facebook for Force.com

Force.com is an on-demand application development platform that will extend Salesforce.com's subscriber base far beyond traditional business software users sometime in 2008. And you can bet Facebook's success as an applications platform had something to do with the decision.

Force.com will give customers, developers and independent software vendors the ability to create custom applications and user interfaces that can be accessed from desktop PCs, iPhones or retail kiosks using the Salesforce.com service. That's the advantage from the end user perspective.

For developers and hosts, there are other advantages, such as ability to create and support new applications without the need for new Web servers and data center facilities. The new platform will operate in much more of an on-demand basis, as a result.

Visualforce uses HTML, AJAX and Flex programming languages.