In the Force.com platform, all the development and deployment can be done via the browser version. However, there are some tasks that can be easily completed using a tool rather than the browser version, for example, Data Loader for uploading bulk data, the Force.com IDE for developing Apex classes and Visualforce pages, the Migration tool for deploying the Force.com components from one organization to another, and so on. We can categorize the Force.com tools into the following categories:

In this chapter, we will provide a high-level description of these tools.