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

The Ant migration toolkit


Anyone familiar with the Java ecosystem will immediately recognize Ant, the stalwart task automation and build tool. While other tools such as Gradle, Maven, and Ivy have recently eclipsed it in popularity, it is an incredibly powerful tool, not just for deploying Salesforce metadata, but also for automating continuous integration builds, packaging, and general workflow automation. Ant is both the name of the tool as well as the language used to define tasks. As crazy as it sounds, Ant is an XML-based programming language, and automated tasks are defined in an XML file. Traditionally, this is called build.xml. The migration toolkit from Salesforce is distributed as a .jar file and defines tasks such as <sf:retrieve> and <sf:deploy>. Salesforce tasks rely on two other files that you must also create. The build.properties file contains information like your username, password, and instance URL. The package.xml file contains the information related to the...