Enterprise organizations have complex processes and integration requirements that typically span multiple locations around the world. They seek out the best in class applications that support not only their current needs but also those of the future. The ability to adapt an application to their practices, terminology, and integrations with other existing applications or processes is a key to them. They invest as much in your application as they do in you as the vendor capable of delivering an application strategy that will grow with them.
Throughout this book, you will be shown how to architect and support enduring applications for enterprise clients with Salesforce by exploring how to identify architecture needs and design solutions based on industry-standard patterns.
Large-scale applications require careful coding practices to keep the code base scalable. You'll learn advanced coding patterns based on industry-standard enterprise patterns and reconceive them for Force.com, allowing you to get the most out of the platform and build in best practices from the start of your project.
As your development team grows, managing the development cycle with more robust application life cycle tools and using approaches such as Continuous Integration become increasingly important. There are many ways to build solutions on Force.com; this book cuts a logical path through the steps and considerations for building packaged solutions from start to finish, covering all aspects from engineering to getting it into the hands of your customers and beyond, ensuring that they get the best value possible from your Force.com application.
Chapter 1, Building, Publishing, and Supporting Your Application, gets your application out to your prospects and customers using packages, AppExchange, and subscriber's support.
Chapter 2, Leveraging Platform Features, ensures that your application is aligned with the platform features and uses them whenever possible, which is great for productivity when building your application, but—perhaps more importantly—it ensures whether your customers are also able to extend and integrate with your application further.
Chapter 3, Application Storage, teaches you how to model your application's data to make effective use of storage space, which can make a big difference to your customer's ongoing costs and initial decision-making when choosing your application.
Chapter 4, Apex Execution and Separation of Concerns, explains how the platform handles requests and at what point Apex code is invoked. This is important to understand how to design your code for maximum reuse and durability.
Chapter 5, Application Service Layer, focuses on understanding the real heart of your application: how to design it, make it durable, and future proofing around a rapidly evolving platform using Martin Fowler's Service pattern as a template.
Chapter 6, Application Domain Layer, aligns Apex code typically locked away in Apex Triggers into classes more aligned with the functional purpose and behavior of your objects, using object-orientated programming (OOP) to increase reuse and streamline code and leverage Martin Fowler's Domain pattern as a template.
Chapter 7, Application Selector Layer, leverages SOQL to make the most out of the query engine, which can make queries complex. Using Martin Fowler's Mapping pattern as a template, this chapter illustrates a means to encapsulate queries, making them more accessible and reusable and making their results more predictable and robust across your code base.
Chapter 8, User Interface, covers the concerns of an enterprise application user interface with respect to translation, localization, and customization, as well as the pros and cons of the various UI options available in the platform.
Chapter 9, Lightning, explains the architecture of this modern framework for delivering rich client-device agnostic user experiences, from a basic application through to using component methodology to extend Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile.
Chapter 10, Providing Integration and Extensibility, explains how enterprise-scale applications require you to carefully consider integration with existing applications and business needs while looking into the future by designing the application with extensibility in mind.
Chapter 11, Asynchronous Processing and Big Data Volumes, shows that designing an application that processes massive volumes of data either interactively or asynchronously requires consideration in understanding your customer's volume requirements and leverages the latest platform tools and features, such as understanding the query optimizer and when to create indexes.
Chapter 12, Unit Testing, explores the differences and benefits of unit testing versus system testing. This aims to help you understand how to apply dependency injection and mocking techniques to write unit tests that cover more code scenarios and run faster. You will also look at leveraging practical examples of using the Apex Stub API and the ApexMocks open source library.
Chapter 13, Source Control and Continuous Integration, shows that maintaining a consistent code base across applications of scale requires careful consideration of Source Control and a planned approach to integration as the application is developed and implemented.
In order to follow the practical examples in this book, you will need to install the Salesforce Force.com IDE, Apache Ant v1.9 or later, and Java v1.8 or later, and have access to Salesforce Developer Edition Orgs via developer.salesforce.com.
The following is the list of software requirements for this book:
Salesforce Developer Edition Orgs
Java v1.8 (or later)
Apache Ant v1.9 (or later)
GitHub client (optional)
Salesforce Force.com IDE
Salesforce Developer Console (optional)
This book is aimed at Force.com developers who are looking to push past Force.com basics and learn how to truly discover its potential. You will find this handy if you are looking to expand your knowledge of developing packaged ISV software and complex, scalable applications for use in enterprise businesses with the Salesforce platform. This book will enable you to know your way around Force.com's non programmatic functionality as well as Apex and aid you in learning how to architect powerful solutions for enterprise-scale demands. If you have a background in developing inside other enterprise software ecosystems, you will find this book an invaluable resource for adopting Force.com.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The Database.merge and merge DML statements support merging of accounts, leads, and contact records."
A block of code is set as follows:
public class ContestantService{
public class RaceRetirement{
public Id contestantId;
public String reason;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
public class ProvisionalResult{
public Integer racePosition {get; set;}
public Id contestantId {get; set;}
public String contestantName {get; private set;}
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
ant package.installdemo
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can see the current storage utilization from the Custom Settings page under Setup"
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The collective source code for the application built throughout the book is available in the main branch. For each chapter, a branch has been provided containing the code added during that chapter building from the previous one, for example, branch chapter-02 will contain code from chapter-01.
The repository for this book can be found at https://github.com/afawcett/forcedotcom-enterprise-architecture.
An alternate way to download the source code is to navigate to www.github.com in your browser using the link given in the preceding section, locate the repository and branch you want to download, either the main branch or a specific chapter branch, and then click on the Download Zip button in the sidebar on the right.
Alternatively, you can download the GitHub desktop clients as listed above and click on the Clone in Desktop button.
Of course, if you are familiar with Git, you are free to use the tool of your choice.
Once you have the source code downloaded for your chosen chapter, you should execute the Ant build script to deploy the code into your chosen Salesforce Developer Edition org (as described in Chapter 1, Building, Publishing, and Supporting Your Application).
Open a command line and navigate to the root folder where you downloaded the source code (this should be the folder with the build.xml file in it). To deploy the code, execute the following command, all on one line:
# ant deploy [email protected] -Dsf.password=mypasswordmytoken
Remember that the password and token are concatenated together.
Keep in mind that each chapter branch builds incrementally from the last and will overlay new files as well as changes into your chosen DE org. So, each branch may overwrite changes you make to existing files as you have been exploring that chapter. If you are concerned about this, it is best to use one of the desktop development tools listed earlier, and prior to running the previous command, download the code from the server for safe keeping.
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ForcedotcomEnterpriseArchitectureSecondEdition_ColorImages.pdf.
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