The next quarterly rev of Salesforce lets developers, not only play around with the skin, but change the user interface altogether. Visualforce, which was unleashed for previews last fall, will be part of the upcoming summer release.

“Visualforce is about pixel-level control and scripting any interactions,” explained Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform marketing, who proceeded to show how Salesforce customer Dolby Labs used the tooling to totally change the look and feel of its application, which runs on the Salesforce platform. Billing it as “user interface-as-a-Service” (the acronym for that would be pretty ugly), the difference is that you can work with Visualforce back on the server, designing the Ui into the core app, rather than doing some modest repositioning and addition or subtraction of the usual controls on the client. It will allow customers to write totally new UIs, which could include multi-step, tightly coupled navigations, such as constructing wizards that guide users as they navigate through an app.

Additionally, Salesforce will release components, which initially will include the controls and widgets that are part and parcel of its familiar UI. The idea of components is eliminating the need to build all the plumbing behind a UI from scratch every time. Not surprisingly, Salesforce will also let customers build their own UI components.

Visualforce has already been previewed and tested by 4000 developers who have built 11,000 UIs, and it has also been used by Coda, a UK-based ERP vendor, to launch its new on demand offering, CODA2go at Salesforce’s London Dreamforce event today.

Obviously, given Salesforce slow but premeditated morph from on demand CRM to on demand platform, it’s hardly a surprise that they would release full UI tooling. It’s part of their overall Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) positioning, which has also seen emergence of Apex, their stored procedures and Java-like development language. The only thing that’s mildly surprising, or maybe amusing, is that the capabilities that Salesforce is touting were taken for granted during the heyday of rich client 4GL development nearly 15 years ago. The difference being that today, it’s in the context of an online, on demand environment.

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