Salesforce.com goes mobile-first on latest platform release

Salesforce.com is pushing out the latest release of its back-end platform for developers, and this time around the social enterprise giant is focusing big time on mobile.

A mobile-first mentality is where a lot of businesses are at these days, and Salesforce.com reps assert that "every use of an application starts mobile-first." But no matter what the platform, there are certain elements that always need to be in place, including instant-on access and the availability of real-time data.

To meet these needs, the Summer '12 release essentially overhauls and revolutionizes the Salesforce cloud platform to support mobile app development, according to Adam Seligman, vice president of developer relations at Salesforce.

Arguing that mobile is the future of computing, Seligman remarked that the back-end is still up for grabs, offering Salesforce the opportunity to get ahead in this arena now.

Seligman also commented that he has witnessed the "radical transformation of Salesforce into a platform company" over the last several months. Part of that transformation has come about thanks to rapid growth.

For example, Salesforce now retains more than 300,000 custom apps on Force.com, with more than 1.7 million on Heroku on top of that. Furthermore, there are more than a half million registered developers on Force.com, and Salesforce completed roughly 54 billion transactions last quarter.

Salesforce.com usually publishes three new platform releases each year. Here's a rundown on some of the new features that will be rolling out with the Summer '12 edition:

• Geo-location fields in Database.com so every app can be location-aware
• Chatter Rest APIs: Like they would with people, users can follow objects in the database for constant updates and then build social-centric apps around that field
• Schema Builder: Developer can drag-and-drop cloud databases with instant REST APIs within database.com. Seligman described, "You have a cloud data service that is ready to wire into your mobile app."
• More integration for ISVforce (a unified solution for building, distributing, selling enterprise apps) with Salesforce's AppExchange enterprise app marketplace

Screenshots via Salesforce.com

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