Architect Core Resources
Architect Core Resource Library
The Force.com Architect Core Resource Library is a collection of white papers, best practices, and other documents that help architects and ISVs maximize their success. Read these documents to learn how to extend existing infrastructure and security frameworks, design advanced Force.com applications, overcome common architectural challenges, and more.
Getting Started
- A Comprehensive Look at the Force.com Cloud-Computing Platform — Start with an in-depth technical overview of the Force.com platform and its constituent parts.
- The Force.com Multitenant Architecture — Force.com's foundation is a metadata-driven software architecture that enables multitenant applications.Learn how this makes the platform fast, scalable, and secure.
Platform Administration
- Whitepaper: Secure, private, and trustworthy: enterprise cloud computing with Force.com — Force.com provides a number of security features, from infrastructure security through network, SSO, authentication and data sharing.
- Guide to Sharing Architecture (PDF) — A review of data accessibility components, sample sharing model use cases, real customer sharing solutions, and troubleshooting guidelines.
- Record Access: Under the Hood (PDF) — A description of the database architecture Salesforce uses to provide fast and secure record access, and an explanation of why changing record access configurations impacts performance.
Platform Development
- Asynchronous Processing in Force.com — Learn how underlying concepts of Salesforce mechanisms and implementation that affect asynchronous processing in non-obvious ways, and techniques to design better asynchronous processes on the platform.
- Coming Soon: Papers on Apex and VisualForce Performance Improvements.
Data Management
- An Introduction to the Force.com Database — Learn more about Force.com's database technology, determining where your data is stored, and how it is distributed across your applications and backends.
- Best Practices for Deployments with Large Data Volumes — Underlying concepts and best practices for supporting and improving the performance of Force.com implementations with large data volumes.
Integrations
- Integrating with the Force.com Platform — There are many ways to integrate with the Force.com platform, including the Web Services API, outbound messages, email, and HTTP/REST calls.
- Coming Soon: Integration Best Practices
Infrastructure
- An Introduction to Environments — Applications are built, and delivered, in online environments. Some environments have different capabilities than others. These article provides a rundown of the various environments available, and how and when to use them.
- Coming Soon: Planning Your Organization Strategy — How many organizations should my company have? What should be the criteria for creating a new organization? What considerations should I make when defining my organization strategy? These questions and more will be answered.
Architecting for Commercial Applications
- Architecting a Commercial Application — If you're going to build a commercial application, then there are additional considerations to be aware of, in particular those of packaging, licensing and distribution. This article will help you identify the most common architectural pieces to consider before development.
- Designing an Application for Group and Professional Edition — This article is intended for partners planning to sell an application to GE and PE customers.