Category Archives: APEX

Force.com Dev 501 Class

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The week of October 10th I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Force.com’s Dev 501 class in Atlanta. This class went beyond the declarative capabilities of Force.com covered in Dev 401 and expanded into APEX and Visualforce controllers.

Apex is an object oriented  programming language,  similar to Java and C#,  for building software as a service (SaaS) applications on top of Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) functionality.  Apex gives developers access to Salesforce.com’s back-end database and metadata objects to create third-party SaaS applications. These 3rd party applications are offered for sale or free of charge in the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, similar to the Apple and Android app stores.

Visualforce is a framework that includes a tag-based markup language,  similar to HTML or ASP.Net.

In the Visualforce markup language, each Visualforce tag corresponds to a user interface component, such as a section of a page or a field. The behavior of Visualforce components can be controlled by the same logic used in standard Salesforce pages, or developers can create  their own logic with controller classes written in Apex.

The Dev 501 class covers an amazing array of topics…just a few of which are APEX triggers, Force.com IDE Eclipse plugin, development sandboxes, SOQL queries, DML (data modeling language), deployment from sandbox to production organizations, consuming web services, and unit testing Apex classes.

Format of the class was lecture mixed with hands on exercises reinforced by formal questions answered out loud by attendees at the end of every lecture and exercise.  This was actually the most challenging formal training class I have attended since college…and also one of the best.

 

 

Salesforce.com Rocks

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Yesterday (Thursday April 5th) I attended a nicely done seminar/reception at the Westin Buckhead by Salesforce.com. There must have been several hundred attendees at the 1:30pm keynote which provided a good overview of Salesforce, APEX, and AppExchange. After the keynote there were several breakout sessions; one for beginning/potential customers, one for experienced customers, and another for developers focused on the new on-demand (SaaS) APEX language. I attended the APEX seminar for 2.5 hours where I received a good introduction to Salesforce customization and programming techniques. Salesforce is like many of the new Web 2.0 companies offering a unique and innovative value proposition to customers and partners. It is more of a platform where many types of applications can be created by development partners and then offered to customers via AppExchange, an “eBay like” space for selling/exchanging applications. Of course most of the applications are functional extensions of Salesforce CRM or are complimentary to CRM in some fashion. But they don’t have to be. Since Salesforce offers a free developer account I have signed up and plan on trying my hand at creating an APEX application. I predict Salesforce could potentially dominate the CRM market, and apparently so do many large corporations such as DuPont, Cisco, Panasonic, Avis, and United Way just to name a few Salesforce customers.

All attendees received two books, “Salesforce for Dummies” and “AppExchange for Dummies.” And the reception with open bar and lots of munchies (butterfly shrimp, crab cakes, steak on a stick, etc.) was super nice.

Thanks Salesforce!