Calling Apex a developer preview, with Beta not promised until "later this year" Salesforce.com is trying to extend its reach by establishing itself as a "platform" company, according to Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing, not unlike other major enterprise platform vendors such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

When finally released, the Apex programming language -- which uses a Java-like syntax -- will give developers full programmatic control to build any application as an on-demand application.

According to Kelman, programmers will not have to worry about infrastructure, such as tuning programs for specific hardware, databases, or operating systems.

Apex will give corporate programmers as well as ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) the ability to create data models, automate business logic, and create interfaces.

"We do the backup, tune performance, deliver network transactions, all the infrastructure needed to deploy an application worldwide," Kelman said.