Practical Salesforce Architecture

Chapter 2. How It All Works

Now that you have a handle on all the basic terminology, we’ll dive a little deeper into the technical components. Salesforce concepts and products are getting unified and renamed all the time, so please be aware that some of the names you see here may be incorrect, depending on when you read this.

We will be focusing on the soft “virtual” tiers of the platform and some of the untouchable real tiers in this chapter. Some of the underlying systems may not be directly accessible or available for use in their classic sense (by end users or administrators). For example, the underlying database system in Salesforce is powered by Oracle, but you can’t write stored procedures for it or use native Structured Query Language (SQL); Oracle is behind the curtain. You’ll need to pay attention to the caveats, but knowing what they are will help you understand the connected functionality.

Basic Concepts of the “Full Stack”

If you’re familiar with the concept of full stack development, this won’t be new to you. Basically, at any layer of the stack, you can have functions, code, or customization. As Figure 2-1 shows, there are layers that can be customized (unlocked) and others that cannot (locked). The data and many configurations are accessible through a variety of APIs and user interfaces. This is another highly simplified referential diagram; there is a lot of nuance to each of these layers, and we will drill into many of them later in this book.

Figure 2-1. ...