What is Visualforce?

The purpose of this introductory blog is to give you a brief introduction on Visualforce. Visualforce is basically a component based framework to build custom pages. This framework uses tags to build components that make up a page. There are about 70 components which are already made available by the Salesforce framework. But that doesn't mean that you cannot create your own component. The framework allows developers to create custom components.

When you begin life as a Salesforce developer you will face numerous occasions when the end users demand custom pages or something different than what Salesforce's native environment has to offer. Luckily they are easily solved by developing Visualforce pages. You can develop custom user interfaces using two ways. One by using Visualforce Components framework or use the automatically generated Page Layouts that Salesforce environment provides.


Visualforce also follows the MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm. Hence the VF pages provide tight integration with the Salesforce database.

Now let’s take a deeper look at how VF pages are built and rendered. Visualforce pages are made up of components (custom or already available). These components basically render HTML tags when called from the browser. Once the VF pages are constructed and saved in the Salesforce servers the users can access those pages using url links in the browser.  For those of you who haven’t caught on to what I have been saying he interesting part starts now. When a call is made to the Salesforce servers for those pages, the VF tags are rendered as HTML tags instead and an HTML page is displayed at the browser. (Your browser has no clue how to interpret VF tags).

You might be wondering why we need to build VF pages using VF tags then. Obviously HTML tags serve a purpose but the main advantage of using VF tags is it reduces the amount of code that needs to be written by about 90%. This is the primary reason younger Salesforce Developers like myself love the Visualforce and Apex Development platform.  This process is explained in the image below.

  

This is just a brief synopsis of the Visualforce…the next post will dive into more technical functionality….which I’m sure will be more exciting for everyone…especially you artistic types.