With the full launch of Apex and the announcement of Visualforce, many Salesforce administrators are asking us about the future of S-Controls. (Note: S-Controls are client side JavaScript snippets which allow you to override layout elements and perform more complex business logic on the Salesforce.Com platform.) S-Controls are not going away anytime soon. Here are a few reasons why S-Controls are going to be around for at least a few more years:

1. Legacy Code – Many Salesforce.Com customers wrote a lot of S-Control code and won’t be re-writing it anytime soon. In order to ensure that the platform works properly for these customers, Salesforce will have to continue to support S-Controls for the foreseeable future.
2. Unlimited/Apex Edition – As it stands now, Apex is a tool which is available in Unlimited Edition or with a special Apex upgrade to the platform. Since not all customers will be able to afford Apex, S-Controls will continue to serve a valuable alternative.
3. Visualforce – Until Visualforce is 100% launched, we can’t truly replace all of our S-Control code with Apex. Apex itself contains almost no display logic. When connected to Visualforce, it will be able to perform complex business logic and display logic. Currently, S-Controls allow you to do both business and display logic.
4. Developer Skills – While Apex and Visualforce both have very intuitive and familiar syntax, they are still very new and there is not a large community of development talent around these technologies. S-Controls are based on JavaScript and there are tons of JavaScript developers around.

Don’t get me wrong … someday down the road Apex & Visualforce will eventually replace the need for S-Controls; however, a lot needs to happen before that day comes. So, for now, you don’t need to make re-writing all of your S-Controls a top priority.