At an event this week described as "the Woodstock of developers conferences," Salesforce.com announced the new Force.com Sites hosted cloud environment and accompanying integration tools for Amazon and Facebook.

After first inventing itself as a premier SaaS (software as a service) practioner, Salesforce.com is now reinventing itself as a "cloud computing" company. This week, it's introducing a "PaaS" (platform as a service) hosted environment called Force.com Sites, along with new developers tools for Facebook front-end and Amazon back-end integration.

A week after Microsoft's announcement of its own Azure cloud development platform, Google partner Salesforce unveiled Force.com Sites and the accompanying tools at its own Dreamforce, an event dubbed "the Woodstock of developers conference" by Charlie Bell, a speaker from Amazon.com.

Now available in developer preview mode, Force.com Sites will let developers build both Internet and intranet sites and applications that will run in Salesforce.com data centers. Developers will also be able to customize standard Salesforce apps and integrate their apps with other cloud services, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week.

"Why are you using Notes and .NET and SQL Server and SharePoint to deliver Web sites when you can use our sites? Now you can run all your Web applications, Web sites, intranets, and portals on the Web in our cloud, and can reach everyone on the Web, not just your customers and vendors and partners," Benioff told developers at Dreamforce during his keynote speech.

Salesforce will initially host customers' "specialized clouds" at its two data centers in the US, and these will be followed later by data centers opening up later in Europe, Singapore, and Japan.

Salesforce also announced the first two members of an anticipated series of developers toolsets for Force.com Sites. Both are available for free download on Salesforce.com's Web site.

Geared to applications requiring considerable computing power, Force.com Tools for EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is designed to let developers export tasks to Amazon's massive EC2 cloud for execution as an Amazon Machine Image.

Force.com for Facebook, by comparison, provides direct access to Facebook APIs from within Apex Code, for creating social graph applications and "experiences" that connect directly to Force.com Sites.