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

Summary


Regardless of the method used for deployment, the goal is to move your changes from your development sandbox to production. For smaller code changes, a single class and its tests, or for declarative metadata, such as page layouts and object additions, I prefer the public audit trail provided by change sets. On the other hand, if I'm deploying an entire features' worth of code and tests, I almost always go for an IDE or Ant deployment. And if there's more than one developer deploying metadata, I always automate the process with a continuous integration tool with Ant. Remember that the only way to remove metadata from a production org is through the Ant toolkit or the Force.com IDE. This is reason enough to learn the pointy details of the ant toolkit's XML files.

In the next chapter, we'll dive into using APIs to build integrations into and out of Salesforce. Integrations require extensive testing, but can ultimately provide your Salesforce org with quick, efficient, and powerful methods...