Salesforce.com is attempting to position its Apex development platform as the underlying infrastructure of choice for hosted applications in a bid to become “the Microsoft of the On-Demand world”.
Apex, which was launched in October last year, is used to develop Salesforce’s own applications and comprises a Java-like programming language, a screen builder and development tools.
But it also includes platform services such as single sign-on capabilities and a common user interface and data-sharing model, which provide the underlying application plumbing.
