I've been directed to force.com as an alternative to creating an application using PHP and MySQL. My question is about deployment. What happens after I build the application on force.com. If the application is based on their API, will I be able to serve this application from my own domain if I wanted?
A:
Simple answer is "no".
Your application is hosted on their servers, built in their own language (based on Java and Oracle DB but you'll never see them directly). You will create your application mostly with clicking through the setup (even for adding fields to tables there's GUI, no way to say ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN), in some rare cases when you'll need complex logic you might resort to programming in Apex and Visualforce - but these languages won't work outside Salesforce.com platform.
Having said that - of course you can use your own domain name (to literally "serve this application from my own domain") and there are many integration possibilities so Salesforce app could interact with other application written in PHP for example... But there is no straightforward way to create your own "salesforce server" like you'd install an Apache or MySQL server.
You rely on their service for both hardware and software which will act as web server, execute your custom code etc.
Last thing - if you hope to build something reusable that might be helpful to other companies and you'd like to sell it in some sane way (not having to repeat all the clicking in each client's environment etc), have a look at appexchange. It's a place where you can find many pre-built Force.com apps (think about them like plugins to Wordpress, Joomla, osCommerce...).
eyescream
2010-10-17 20:53:17