The Force.com Multitenant Architecture: Understanding the Design of Salesforce.com’s Internet Application Development Platform

The Application Framework

Developers can declaratively build custom Force.com applications using the “native” Force.com application framework. The platform’s native point-and-click interface supports all facets of the application development process, including the creation of an application’s data model (custom objects and their fields, relationships, etc.), security and sharing model (users, organization hierarchies, profiles, etc.), user interface (screen layouts, data entry forms, reports, etc.), as well as logic and work flow.

Force.com application framework user interfaces are easy to build because there’s no coding involved. Behind the scenes, they support all the usual data access operations, including queries, inserts, updates, and deletes. ...