Developer Edition
About the Force.com Developer Edition and Force.com Free Edition Environments
Development and deployment on Force.com typically takes place in an environment or org, which provides a number of features for applications within that environment. There are two types of environments in particular that deserve to be called out:
- The Developer Edition (DE) environment is where you develop Force.com applications for free.
- The Free Edition (FE) environment is where you can deploy Force.com applications for free.
Each has its own set of capabilities, but the primary difference between these two free editions of Force.com is that one is suitable for development, while the other is ideal for production deployment.
About Environments
An environment lets you instantly start developing, testing and deploying your software-as-a-service application, and you don't need to touch a single server, they're provisioned in the cloud. The Developer Edition comes with a number of applications pre-installed, including Salesforce CRM applications like Sales, Call Center, Marketing, and Ideas - in case you want to build extensions to these.
There are many more types of environments (obviously not all of them are free!) - for example there are environments for testing and for unlimited production deployment. These are described in An Introduction to Environments.
The Developer Edition
When you're ready to begin developing, you'll find that Developer Edition is equipped with the latest developer technologies such as the Apex programming language, Visualforce for building custom user interfaces and controllers, the Force.com Web services API, and more.
Sign up for a Developer Edition by joining Developer Force. You'll get your new environment provisioned immediately, letting you begin coding right away.
When you sign up for a new DE environment, you will now have access to a slew of features. You have direct access to Apex, Visualforce, the Force.com Web Services API, Force.com Sites, the Database Services, Packaging and much more.
A number of licenses are provided for other salesforce.com products as well:
- Salesforce Customer Portal
- 2 Salesforce CRM licenses
- 2 Salesforce Mobile licenses
- 3 Salesforce Platform licenses
- 5 Salesforce Partner licenses
- 10 Salesforce Customer Portal Manager licenses
You also get access to Developer Preview technology, as it becomes available.
Limits for Developer Edition:
- 5.0 MB of Data Storage
- 20.0 MB of File Storage ( attachments)
- 5000 API requests per 24 hours
- Any number of applications
- A 500 MB bandwidth and 10 minute service request time limits (per rolling 24 hours) for Force.com Sites applications.
The Free Edition
Once you've developed your application, you have an option to deploy that application for free using the Force.com Free Edition.
Sign up for a Force.com Free Edition environment. You'll get your new environment provisioned immediately, letting you begin deploy right away.
This has very different limits to that of the Developer Edition:
- 100 Users
- A single application
- 1 GB Storage
- Up to 10 Custom Objects per user
- Up to 250,000 page views per month for Force.com Sites applications
- No access to other Salesforce CRM products.
- No access to Developer Preview technology.
- While you can use many of the low level developer features such as the Apex programming language and Visualforce user interface layer, these have to be activated first.
For full details, see the Force.com Free Edition FAQ.
F.A.Q.
Does the Developer Edition expire?
Developer Edition organizations continue to be available as long as these organizations have some type of activity within the previous six months.
How do I access Developer Preview technology?
From time to time, special preview technology is made available to the Developer Force community members. These previews are made available only to Developer Edition.
Currently, there are no developer previews.
Where can I get the test methods for the included Apex Code in the Developer Edition?
The test methods for the Apex Class XMLDom available on code.google.com, you can add these to your org if you are planning on deploying code from your new Developer Edition. The required test methods are found at XMLDomTest.