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On-demand customer relationship management (CRM) application vendor Salesforce.com  used the winter release of its flagship CRM service Salesforce SFA to formally launch Apex, a new platform and programming language.

First announced in October, the Apex platform allows corporate and in-house developers to create business applications, such as data models and objects, to manage data in an on-demand environment.

Salesforce.com will host the new applications and the data centers needed to capture information, which means that customers will not be burdened with those infrastructure costs.

The Apex platform includes a

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workflow engine for managing collaboration of data between users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions and a Web services API for programmatic access, mash-ups and integration with other applications and data.

The Web services API will make it possible to access and manage complex data relationships -- such as a set of information about an account, all the products they have bought and all of their contacts -- in a single request.

The real-time messaging and integration feature allows the on-demand CRM application to notify other applications running in an enterprise environment, including middleware, message busses or software applications, of new business events like the creation of a new customer or the closing of a sales opportunity.

The Apex launch represents the next step for Salesforce.com in expanding into being the hub of an on-demand applications universe from being a simple CRM application vendor.

In addition to allowing developers to create and expand on existing on-demand applications, the platform will also enable them to offer these new extensions and applications to other Salesforce.com customers on the AppExchange platform.

"By making the Apex platform and programming language available, Salesforce.com is enabling the ecosystem to lead the way for the next level of innovation in on-demand," said Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff in a statement.

Forrester analyst Liz Herbert noted that the real-time messaging feature will make Salesforce.com a more important player in enterprise environments, which tend to have a greater variety of on-premise and on-demand applications than smaller or mid-size firms.

Salesforce.com is also giving developers an early look at the beta version of the new Apex programming code today, and expects to make the beta available to customers later this year.

The Java-like code, also announced last fall, will allow developers to customize the core features and functionality of their Salesforce.com applications.

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