Salesforce.com launches Web dev platform for on-demand software
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The success of Facebook's Web-app building tools hasn't gone unnoticed by Salesforce.com, which on Friday announced a new platform for building on-demand business software that it hopes will lead to an "explosion" of applications.
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Software maker Salesforce.com Inc.   said it reached an agreement with Google  to  make Web-based software applications that help businesses  improve sales and marketing.
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Software maker Salesforce.com Inc. said it reached an agreement with Google to make Web-based software applications that help businesses improve sales and marketing.
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Plays nice with Oracle Salesforce.com is today expected to take its latest step towards improving integration with third-parties' software, including business rival Oracle.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - While the landscape for rich Web development technologies is getting crowded, industry dignitaries at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif. Thursday nonetheless saw a place for the various entrants in this space. The field of technologies has grown to include AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun's JavaFX, said Neal Ford, application architect for Thoughtworks, who moderated a panel addressing rich Web development. Audience members also gave a nod to the Ruby, Python, and Groovy languages. Panelist Scott Davis, an author and consultant, said he originally thought that AJAX would rule the world. "It runs in any browser," Davis said. But his horizons have expanded. "Quite honestly, I've gotten really interested in Flex recently," Davis said. The recent open-sourcing of Flex has made it more attractive, he stressed. AJAX drew affirmations with reservations from panelist Jon Ferraiolo, an IBM Web architect who manages the OpenAjax Alliance. "My perspective is that AJAX works today. It's fantastic, it does nearly everything you want to do except for multimedia types of things," Ferraiolo said. "I think there's room for Flash, Flex; there's room for Silverlight. These things are going to be the cutting-edge applications that require the latest features," said Ferraiolo. With the proliferation of mobile devices however, HTML browsing will not be available on all these systems, and the iPhone does not have Flash and probably will not have Silverlight either, said Ferraiolo. AJAX, however, is always there and is open and can be counted on, he said. "There is a continuum of experience that needs to be looked at," said Josh Holmes, an evangelist at Microsoft who is speaking on Silverlight at the conference. There is the standards-based Web with HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and there is AJAX, he said. Moving on, there are platforms optimized for a particular OS or hardware that can render 3D graphics, said Holmes. "My personal opinion is that Silverlight and Flex are definitely on that heavy, rich but not quite platform-optimized edge," Holmes said. There are benefits to both, he said. Another panelist sided with Flex for enterprise usage. "In the enterprise space, I tend to recommend things like Flex because the development is much faster to get up and going," said Bill Scott, AJAX evangelist at Yahoo. "Creating a desktop style [application] in AJAX is still really hard," Scott said. AJAX does fit into a lot of areas, but none of the rich Web technologies will rule the world, he said. Panelists also addressed the question of application-testing. "Yes, testing is absolutely crucial, and as an industry, it's something we have not taken seriously for the last couple of years," Davis said. "I think this is a space that the market realizes isn't served really well right now," said Ryan Breen, vice president of technology at Web performance tester Gomez. The Crosscheck open-source testing platform was cited by panelist Stuart Holloway, co-founder of software developer Relevance. The issue of tools for JavaScript was raised. IntellliJ, said Davis, "has got killer JavaScript support, and it's got wonderful CSS support," he said. But lately, he has been developing with the simpler TextMate tool. "I've found that the overhead of a big heavy tool is less valuable to me than having something that's easy for me to bring up, bring down, refresh," Davis said. This lighter format seems to fit the Web development model, he said. Panelists and an audience member also mourned the lack of staying power of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). "SVG just breaks my heart," Davis said. "SVG had the opportunity to be kind of a unified solution. I wish it would come back strong, but I'm not holding out hope." Silverlight, Holmes said, uses XAML instead of SVG. "My opinion is SVG has kind of stalled and there were some things that were needed beyond it," so Silverlight uses other technologies instead, Holmes said. Ferraiolo said he was one of the initiators of SVG while at Adobe. "SVG was there in 2001, 2002, but Adobe decided to pull the plug on it despite the fact that it was on 200 million desktops," he said.
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Company says the software lets developers create and deploy AJAX applications that look and feel like desktop GUIs.
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Enhancements to Eclipse-based integrated development environment are designed to bring traditional source code and testing tools to hosted Force.com platform.
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Systinet, Amazon, and Altova this week are announcing tools geared toward development of Web services, e-commerce, and XML applications, respectively.
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Salesforce.com today announced the immediate availability of the enhanced sforce Toolkit for IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD).
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Enhancements to Eclipse-based IDE are designed to bring traditional source code and testing tools to hosted Force.com platform.
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Salesforce.com has unveiled AppStore, which offers customers a single place to access, test out and buy more than 400 applications offered through the company's AppExchange marketplace.
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A Mountain View, California, company is launching a platform designed to let developers create telephony applications they can embed in Web pages and existing Web-based services.Ribbit&#39;s back-end technology includes a software switch that essentially connects Internet-based voice communication services with mobile phones, landline phones and text messages. On top of that connection is the Ribbit API (application programming interface) that lets developers build applications that unify the wide variety of communication methods.Developers can build applications that include functions such as recording, sending and receiving voicemail, and making and receiving calls. The applications can be built using Flash, embedded into any Web site, and integrated into existing Web-based services. The platform supports many existing Web-based calling services, such as Skype, GoogleTalk and MSN.Developers can charge end-users for the applications, and Ribbit can handle the billing for them. There are several ways developers can offer and charge for their products, and in some cases Ribbit will share revenue with developers.Ribbit showed off one application a developer has created that embeds phone capabilities into Salesforce.com. By keying a code into a mobile phone, users essentially replace their current voicemail with Ribbit for Salesforce. Then users can listen to or see text transcripts of their mobile voicemail messages within Salesforce. They can send the messages to colleagues and tag them for easy sorting later.Users can also make and receive phone calls through their Salesforce page. Such calls are automatically logged in their Salesforce application.Ribbit for Salesforce will cost $25 per user per month for end-users. It is currently in a private beta with more than 90 companies, and should be widely available in February, Ribbit said.Salute America&#39;s Heroes, a veterans&#39; association, has built essentially a call center application that lets veterans who work for the group make and receive phone calls while at home through a browser. The capability is integrated into a Web site that also hosts tools they use while making the calls. The capability allows the association to take on the cost of the calls rather than reimbursing workers for the use of their home phones.Ribbit designed its own softswitch, which runs on Linux blades and has been certified in an Alcatel-Lucent lab to meet the capabilities and reliability that telecommunications providers typically require, said Ted Griggs, CEO and co-founder of Ribbit. Ribbit&#39;s network operations center is hosted by a third party in Virginia, and the company is working on opening one on the West Coast to offer geographic redundancies. It can add capacity simply by adding more servers.Another, more consumer-oriented application is available to try on the Ribbit developers page. The AIR iPhone is essentially a software-based voice over IP phone that looks just like Apple&#39;s iPhone. Users can make and receive calls to mobile and fixed-line phones, including from the contact list in the phone, on their computers.Ribbit hasn&#39;t quite yet configured its offering in terms of pricing for such consumer applications, but expects to in the first quarter of next year. In the case of the AIR iPhone, Ribbit would share revenue from end-users with the developer.Ribbit says that more than 650 developers are working on new applications, although on Friday only two were listed on the developers site. &quot;Dozens&quot; are near release, a few additional applications should be available on Monday, and many more should be available in the early months of next year, Ribbit said.Ribbit opened its offering to developers in August but plans to officially launch the company, along with details about how its technology and business model work, on Monday.&#160;
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New developer program invites closer integration with search AOL functions.
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Hoping to bridge the gap between software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and on-premise application software, Informatica on Thursday released an on-demand service designed to swap data between Salesforce.com and two in-house database apps.
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InfoWorld - Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn&#39;t. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on Microsoft&#160;as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as &quot;Salesforce.com 2.0&quot; in New York on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications. The service allows customers to use Business Objects' BI tools without having to maintain the software themselves or buy extra servers on which to run it. Business Objects maintains a copy of each customer's data in its own data centers, and employees access the data and BI applications through a Web browser. Business Objects took itsÂ first steps in on-demand softwareÂ last April with the release of crystalreports.com, for sharing reports online. That service has attracted about 50,000 customers, the company said. The new service announced Monday, called Intelligence OnDemand, includes a broader set of applications for formatted reporting, running ad hoc queries and analysis, and displaying BI "dashboards" on a user's desktop. The first version of the service, available now, is for customers who have data stored in Salesforce.com's online CRM applications. Business Objects will load a copy of the customer's Salesforce data to its own data centers and build a data warehouse that customers can use to run their BI queries. The service is aimed at sales and marketing staff and business analysts at companies with a high volume of Salesforce data, and is the first in suite of similar services that Business Objects plans to roll out, the company said. It includes on-demand versions of its Crystal Reports, Crystal Xcelsius and Web Intelligence products. Business Objects has staked outÂ an early lead in on-demand BI, although SAS Institute and some smaller BI vendors are also getting into the game. Proponents of such services say they helps customers to cut costs because they don't have to manage applications themselves or buy servers on which to run them. Business Objects said it's new service will take the "heavy lifting" out of building and maintaining a data warehouse. The trade-off is that customers must trust a third party to look after and provide access to their sensitive company data. Business Objects representatives weren't available to give pricing for the new service, which will be unveiled at an event in California later on Monday to coincide with the start of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. Some more information is at Business Objects new On Demand Web site. The company also opened an online store on Monday where customers can buy external market information, such as sales data for other companies' products, and include it in their data analysis. The information comes from firms such as Thomson Financial, eBay, and Dun & Bradstreet. Customers can buy individual reports from $150, or sign up for a subscription. Â
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Macromedia Monday shipped Flex Builder, an integrated development environment (IDE) for Web applications built on the company&#39;s XML-based Flex application platform.