Ever use force paas to develop web apps?

Question

I am a java developer. I have been working with Grails for the past 3 years and love it My employer is urging me to use Force.com
I attended a workshop held by salseforce.com on their Force.com PaaS The product seems interesting at first glance. It seems enable you to do a lot. My main worry is that i will be limited to what their product can allow me to do
Question What is your experience or views on Force.com PaaS ?

Answer 1

Disclaimer - I'm really biased, but that said, a lot depends on what you're trying to do and the context of the user base. I develop custom apps for web and mobile for clients, as well teach development with the platform to my clients who are salesforce.com customers, and have been an application developer with more traditional platforms, building custom business apps since the pre-1990's. I use it to support my business (totally custom business database app) and I use a Site on the backend to expose a website for my company, built completely in Visualforce pages with Apex controller logic to fetch data from the database. The site is only exposed to anonymous users, and there's no visible indication that the site is hosted on a Force.com platform org. You can check it out here for yourself (this is NOT a promotion of services - just an example.) www.formecentor.com. Visualforce pages can host ANY kind of web content, including HTML5, JS, CSS, Flash, images and even Silverlight. No limitations that I can think of - at least not for me - but of course it depends on what YOU need. Sites is typically a best fit for companies already using the platform, and they get a free site on the backend that can be easily maintained and dynamically connected to their salesforce data.