Welcome to Force.com Development Blueprints.
Since its unveiling in 2008, the Force.com platform has been used by developers all over the world to build a multitude of business applications running on Salesforce-powered cloud computing infrastructure.
The true strength of the Force.com platform is the ease with which developers can quickly acquire the application development skills required for today's modern cloud-based development, without the burden of configuring and managing infrastructure such as operating systems, application servers, and databases.
To their credit, Salesforce has invested heavily in the platform to ensure that it remains state of the art. Force.com provides out-of-the-box support for modern web browsers, mobile devices, and importantly, integration standards such as REST and SOAP. This ensures that Force.com applications can be easily integrated with other cloud-based and enterprise applications.
Throughout this book, we will see how the versatility of the Force.com platform can be leveraged to develop a range of cloud-based solutions across various application domains. I sincerely hope that by the time you have read this book, you will be confident enough to apply your Force.com development skills to build virtually any business application.
Chapter 1, Building and Customizing Your Own Sites, demonstrates how to build a Salesforce community using Site.com. We will also access the data of Force.com in the site and provide the ability to users to log in to the community.
Chapter 2, The E-commerce Framework, shows how to build an e-commerce application on Heroku, powered by data from Force.com. We will also be building a Force.com fulfillment application using Visualforce.
Chapter 3, Building a Full CRM System, covers how to build a traditional Salesforce CRM application to manage student admissions for a university, which features a custom Apex workflow engine to automatically route the course applications to a faculty.
Chapter 4, Building a Reporting System, provides guidance on how to build a custom reporting dashboard using Visualforce, Apex, and Visualforce charting.
Chapter 5, The Force.com Mobile SDK Application, leverages the Salesforce mobile SDK to build a mobile application to display the opportunity data of Salesforce. The technologies used with the mobile SDK in this chapter include HTML5, Heroku, AngularJS, Twitter Bootstrap, and Google Maps.
Chapter 6, Cloud-connected Applications, combines multiple techniques used throughout the previous chapters to build a Visualforce page that can send push notifications of Windows Azure Notification Hubs to an Android application that is running.
Appendix A, Importing Data with the Apex Data Loader, shows you how to import data with the Apex Data Loader.
Appendix B, Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu, provides guidance on installing a Ruby on Rails development environment on the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.
To build the applications in this book, you will need an Enterprise, Unlimited, or Developer (recommended) edition of Salesforce and system administrator access. You will also need a modern web browser such as the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari 5 or 6, or Internet Explorer 9 or 10.
The downloading and installation instructions for other technologies used throughout the book will be presented in the relevant chapters.
This book is intended for intermediate Visualforce developers, who are familiar with the basics of Force.com, Visualforce, and Apex development. An understanding of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript is also useful for some of the more advanced chapters.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The first step in creating a custom application is to create a custom object tab for the VolunteerEvent custom object."
A block of code is set as follows:
// results from the Order search
public List<Order__c> orderSearchResults {get; set;}
// textbox for search parameters
public string orderNumber {get; set;}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<apex:column style="width:15%" headerValue="Actions" rendered="{!line.id == editOrderLineId}"> <apex:commandButton action="{!saveOrderLine}" rerender="OrderInformation, OrderLines, messages" value="Save" /> <apex:commandButton action="{!cancelEditOrderLine}" rerender="OrderInformation, OrderLines, messages" value="Cancel" /> </apex:column>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ cd ~/rails_projects/ecommerce_app $ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean)
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Edit link in the Action column for the Force Volunteers Community option."
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