Development using Salesforce

I'm presently on a short contract developing using the Salesforce platform.

I've been using Salesforce for over 2 months now and I'm afraid to conclude that it doesn't make it as a viable platform for cloud application deployment. The reason for this is quite simple: it forces you to develop in the cloud as distinct from deploying to the cloud.

Salesforce thought that it would be great to re-invent the wheel, introduce a new language (Apex) and introduce the associated tooling. From a developer perspective this means that all of your regular tooling such as version control, continuos integration, deployment management, dependency management... I could go on... simply isn't there. Let me re-state a bit of that: no version control!

Developing on the Salesforce platform also means that you're dealing with 300ms (ish) round trips for every resource in their web development screens. This is because the platform is hosted in the US and the speed of light being what it is. A developer can quite commonly be waiting for several seconds while the development web app is doing its thing; reminds of my COBOL days 25 years ago when we had to submit stuff to a shared compiler resource and wait.

I'm quite turned on by the idea of deploying to the cloud and I think that VMforce and Google App Engine have chosen the right approach; they of course allow you to develop locally and then deploy to the cloud. Full scale application development in the cloud though is another thing and frankly Salesforce have got it wrong.