Book Image

Mastering Application Development with Force.com

By : Kevin J. Poorman
Book Image

Mastering Application Development with Force.com

By: Kevin J. Poorman

Overview of this book

Force.com is an extremely powerful, scalable, and secure cloud platform, delivering a complete technology stack, ranging from databases and security to workflow and the user interface. With salesforce.com's Force.com cloud platform, you can build any business application and run it on your servers. The book will help you enhance your skillset and develop complex applications using Force.com. It gets you started with a quick refresher of Force.com's development tools and methodologies, and moves to an in-depth discussion of triggers, bulkification, DML order of operations, and trigger frameworks. Next, you will learn to use batchable and schedulable interfaces to process massive amounts of information asynchronously. You will also be introduced to Salesforce Lightning and cover components—including backend (apex) controllers, frontend (JavaScript) controllers, events, and attributes—in detail. Moving on, the book will focus on testing various apex components: what to test, when to write the tests, and—most importantly—how to test. Next, you will develop a changeset and use it to migrate your code from one org to another, and learn what other tools are out there for deploying metadata. You will also use command-line tools to authenticate and access the Force.com Rest sObject API and the Bulk sObject API; additionally, you will write a custom Rest endpoint, and learn how to structure a project so that multiple developers can work independently of each other without causing metadata conflicts. Finally, you will take an in-depth look at the overarching best practices for architecture (structure) and engineering (code) applications on the Force.com platform.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Application Development with Force.com
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Targets, macros, and built-ins


Inside the project tag, we're defining a number of target nodes and one macro node. The target nodes define tasks that we can run with the Ant runtime. For instance, we can run ant checkoutFromGit to pull our code and metadata from a git repository. Similarly, this build.xml file defines: retrieve, cleanSourceDirectory, deploy, retrieveAndDeploy, and checkoutFromGitAndDeploy. Any of these can be specified on the Ant command line to fire off that task. Tasks can have dependencies, and if you look closely at the retrieveAndDeploy task, you'll see that it defines the dependencies on retrieve and deploy. Dependencies are run in the order they're defined in and provide you with an easy way to combine several tasks into a more useful task. With our retrieveAndDeploy task, we specify the retrieve task and then the deploy task as dependencies. Nothing else is defined, however, meaning that when we run retrieve and deploy, we're actually running Ant retrieve followed...