I’m a developer who’s about to begin building a relatively complex web application. I was going to build it in Rails or some other MVC framework for PHP such as Yii.
The VP of my organization had a conversation with someone from Salesforce.com/Database.com, and now he wants to build the site on their platform with APEX.
Here’s my question:
If I’m already a developer, and I already know how to use an MVC development framework (such as Rails), what possible advantages could I get from building an application in APEX on the Salesforce.com/Database.com platform?
My initial impression was that this tool was mainly helpful for non-developers.
I think you are a bit off here, at least when it comes to salesforce.com. Although you can build public sites in salesforce using visualforce/apex it kind of seems like an overkill. SF is a primarily a prepackaged SaaS designed to help companies run parts of their operations in the cloud, with Apex being a developer extension and sites being an additional layer helping to build a public site on top of operational data. To best see for yourself register for developer account at http://developer.salesforce.com.
Bottom line, the answer mostly depends on whether or not your web application implements core operations.