Salesforce.com's latest development platform twist

Salesforce.com will take the wraps off the next extension to its platform at its Dreamforce conference next week, opening up more of the underlying tools and further leveraging its hosting environment. According to sources, the company will allow customers and independent software developers to apply new capabilities that go beyond the current AppExchange 7.0 APIs, providing access to an enhanced programming language and the data model, as well as hosting business logic. Developers will be able to create stored procedures, with up to five-level database joins in a statement, across entities hosted in the salesforce.com environment without the need to call external Web services, sources said. For example, clicking on button or link could execute logic that checks sales opportunities, looking for the biggest potential deals and those that haven't been addressed for a specific period, and then schedule appointments and send out the appropriate emails. Having the business logic and Web services natively on the salesforce.com platform should increase performance and ease development, and potentially put a sizable load on the company's data centers. Salesforce.com plans to add these more advanced applications to the AppExchange marketplace and evangelize developers at Dreamforce to build businesses solutions that leverage the expanded platform. Salesforce.com officials declined to comment.