The cloud firm Salesforce has announced an app building program as part of the company’s AppExchange online store.
Salesforce1 Lightning aims to span the gap between minor customisation and extensive development, and allows the broader cloud platform to be adapted to the needs of different industries.
Mike Rosenbaum, executive vice president of the Salesforce1 Platform, said: "It shouldn’t be harder to build an app than it is to run a business.
"With Salesforce1 Lightning, we’ve made technology barriers disappear so anyone can create the apps they need. I can’t wait to see what happens when Lightning gets into the hands of developers and business users."
The Lightning framework hopes to draw in novices with a visual interface that includes many drag-and-drop components ready for instant use.
Its launch follows a $1m programming contest Hackathon taking place in San Francisco ahead of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, with the top prize worth $250,000.
"Salesforce finds itself at the centre of one of the most disruptive transformations in the IT world in 35 years," said Robert Mahowald, program vice president of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud software at market research firm IDC.
"Many Salesforce customers report that they are reducing development cycles and delivery times to build and deploy new applications, allowing them to get to market faster with new products and new applications."
The company currently boasts 1.8 million users in its developer community, up a million from two years ago, a figure which includes those merely tweaking existing apps to those heavily versed in Python, Ruby or Node.
