Salesforce.com has unveiled a new version of its Eclipse-based Force.com integrated development environment.
Announced in conjunction with the EclipseCon conference for developers who use the open-source Eclipse Java development platform, Salesforce.com’s Force.com IDE extends Eclipse beyond traditional software development and provides developers with a development and testing environment to create cloud computing applications on the Force.com platform, the company said.
New features of the latest release of the Eclipse IDE for Force.com development environment includes the Apex Language Code Editor, which provides code completion suggestions as they are typed for user-defined classes, system classes and schema objects; enhanced metadata support, which adds Force.com sites, customer portals and partner portals to Force.com IDE projects; enhancements to schema objects, profiles and reports; and an upgrade wizard that upgrades any Force.com project created in previous supported versions of the IDE, the company said.
“Corporate IT departments can now take full advantage of the power and sophistication of Eclipse to build cloud computing applications on Force.com,” said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing for Salesforce.com, in a statement. “We are excited to bring the benefits of Eclipse to the 125,000-plus members of the Force.com developer community for their application development projects today, but also to help Eclipse developers eager to embrace the possibilities of cloud computing.”
“The Eclipse-based Force.com IDE accelerated the creation and implementation of our custom development projects on Force.com,” said Mike Bene, IT systems architect at Advent Software, a user of the Force.com IDE. “Our IT department has found that building apps in the cloud on Force.com has been demonstrably faster than on a .NET environment.”
The Force.com IDE is available for free at http://developer.force.com, Salesforce.com’s developer Website that provides the community, tools and resources to help developers build cloud computing applications on the Force.com platform, the company said.
Developer.force.com has tool kits for most popular development environments, languages and frameworks-including AJAX, Eclipse, Flex, Java, .NET, PHP and Ruby on Rails, Salesforce.com officials said. Developers also can find tool kits and resources to connect their Force.com applications with other cloud computing services from Amazon, Google and Facebook to create entirely new applications in the cloud, the company said.