Development Environments

Salesforce Environments where users/developers can extend, integrate and develop on Force.com without affecting their production environments.

Development Environments are used strictly for developing and testing apps. These environments contain test data that are not business critical. Development can be done inside the browser or with the Force.com IDE, which is based on Eclipse.

There are two types of Development Environments:

Developer Edition (DE) Environment:

It is a free, fully-featured development environment with limits on data and users. It is a logically separate environment, ideal for initial development on Force.com. Users/Developers can sign-up for as many DE organizations as they require. This allows them to build an application designed for any of the Salesforce Production Environments.

Sandbox:

Sandbox is a nearly identical copy of the Production Environment. It can include data, configurations, or both. It is possible to create multiple Sandboxes in Production Environments for a variety of purposes without compromising the data and applications in the Production Environment.

Different types of Developer Edition and Sandbox Environments:

Let us now look at Testing Environments.