Visualforce Helps Developers Build Interesting Applications Faster

I've written before about how programming in Apex allows developers to be much more productive. Visualforce similarly helps developers avoid writing a lot of boring code.

If Visualforce and Apex were a typical development platform, the canonical way of populating a data bound picklist would be something like this:

Visualforce markup:

<apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
	<apex:outputLabel value="Category" for="expenseCategory"/>
	<apex:selectList multiselect="false" id="expenseCategory" required="true" size="1" value="{!expense.Category__c}">
		<apex:selectOptions value="{!ExpenseCategories}"/>
	</apex:selectList>
</apex:pageBlockSectionItem>

With the following controller code:

public List getExpenseCategories()
{
	Map allObjectTypesMap = Schema.getGlobalDescribe();
	Schema.DescribeFieldResult f = Schema.sObjectType.Expense__c.fields.Category__c;
	List options = new List();
	options.add(new SelectOption('--None--', '--None--'));
	for(Schema.PicklistEntry ple : f.getPicklistValues())
	{
		options.add(new SelectOption(ple.getValue(), ple.getLabel()));
	}
}

One of the benefits of developing on the Force.com platform is that it is very data-driven and has native access to your application's metadata. As a result, the code below is equivalent to the code written above and is much less verbose:

<apex:inputField id="expenseCategory" required="true" value="{!expense.Category__c}"/>

As a result, developers can spend their time building really interesting applications and let the Force.com platform worry about the plumbing.