Building apps without software with Sforce

Adam Gross, director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, showed a densely packed room of Etech attendees the kind of application building that is unfolding at his company and why it is the future of application development. According to Gross, how you build an application is not static, just dependent on the available technology of the day (here he showed couple pictures like an abacus, and a babbage engine). Through abstraction (enabled by excess CPU cycles) the company is blurring the lines between platform and application. Here is how they plan to "spend the next 4Ghz": More abstracting of applications; Separate the definition and deployment of applications; Create Utility computing.

What will it look like? There is a new software stack with a declarative application development model focused on specific application domains.

According to Gross the Sforce API is the most widely used enterprise Web Service: it is now 20% of all Salesforce.com activity, which he defined as page requests.

He then showed a couple examples of how users can configure the application, but at this point his clip-on mic took one too many accidental falls and many among the irritated crowd seemed ready to bail.