If we need more control over the deployment process, we can use other tools that are provided by the Salesforce platform.
The first one, which is also at the core of the other methods, is the use of Metadata APIs. This is a set of APIs that are used to retrieve, deploy, create, or delete metadata items.
This powerful yet simple set of methods communicate with any Salesforce organization, retrieve all kinds of metadata items, create and update a variety of configurations, and finally deploy those components in a target organization.
Like the other tools that we are going to mention, Metadata APIs don't need source and destination organizations in order to refer to the same production instance. This means you can deploy from a developer edition organization to a Full sandbox, from a developer sandbox to a sandbox, the children of different...
