The Force.com IDE exposes the Metadata API, to provide administrators and developers with some very powerful deployment capabilities. Steve Andersen recently blogged about these capabilities and about how using the Force.com IDE made his deployment process more efficient.  Read more. (September 3)

---

The flag of "cloud computing" is getting wrapped around a great many services that do very different things. Rather than talking about grids, clusters, virtualized servers, and enterprise clouds, I wonder if it's more clear to talk about the differences in terms of another technology that's commonly packaged in comparably different ways.  Read more. (September 3)

---

In my last blog entry, I wrote about a Zillow-Salesforce mashup up I was writing.  It is now complete.  You can find the complete article and the code here.  The article is meant to be used as an illustrative example of using REST based services on Force.com, Read more. (September 3)

---

I'm writing a small article - an introduction to Apex - and so I'm of course learning a few things about Apex while doing so.  Read more. (September 3)

---

If you have not yet downloaded Google's Chrome browser -- sorry, as of now only offered in beta for Windows XP and Vista -- then I urge you to make the time. My initial reactions are that it's enough like Firefox to be familiar, sufficiently improved over Firefox to be worth the effort of migration, and sufficiently faster at many tasks that it's likely to become my default tool -- on Windows -- for anything more than simple browsing.  Read more. (September 2)

---