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May 01, 2012 | Alex Berg: Shared Salesforce Sandbox Issues

Sharing a Salesforce org for development can be a challenge. I’ve heard about some teams successfully using version control and continuous integration in their Salesforce development, but their process may not work for every team for a variety of reasons. I’d like to point out a few issues in particular when sharing development sandboxes with other developers.

April 02, 2012 | Craig Isakson: iOS Salesforce SDK Tips

Recently I have had the opportunity to start to use the Salesforce SDK for iOS.  So far this has been a great tool which takes care of a lot of the leg work in dealing with the Salesforce REST api.  Until now I have mostly concentrated my efforts in the Android arena.  When I did start to write an app in iOS I had found that there were a couple of issues that I was having troubles with.

March 30, 2012 | Alex Berg: Salesforce DE Org - Great Javascript Sandbox

Compared to other sites, Salesforce can feel a bit sluggish. I’ve seen some web apps, such as Gmail, Grooveshark, and the new Twitter site, that feel quite responsive, making them more fun to use and explore. I found that the enabling tool at use in these sites is Ajax and lots of Javascript to move the application logic into the web browser instead of the server. These highly responsive apps inspired me to start playing with Javascript and other HTML5 features to see what’s possible client-side to make the web site experience faster. I chose to test these Javascript ideas in my Salesforce Developer Edition org, and looking back, I’m pleasantly surprised with how good of a choice this was.

March 21, 2012 | Alex Berg: Uninterrupted Workflows with Open Source Tools

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a multi-file upload tool for Visualforce pages that a member of the Force.com community had written. In a lengthy blog post, he summarized the challenges involved with designing and implementing his Javascript upload tool. I found it to be quite an interesting read, so interesting, in fact, that I promised myself to return when I had free time to clean up the code. I finally found free time last weekend, and when I finished refactored the code and reflected on the experience, I saw a huge benefit when using an open source code tool.

March 20, 2012 | Craig Isakson: Underdog

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend Mobile March in the Twin Cities.  During the conference, I attended a four hour long Microsoft Windows Phone training session.  My reasoning for attending this session was to learn more about a platform I have little experience in.

February 14, 2012 | Alex Berg: Mitigating Maintenance Cost with Open Source Software

Open source is an interesting thing. If I open the source for my software product, anyone can make a clone of my product and easily recreate my company’s money-maker. Open source is bad in this situation. On the other hand, due simply to the price difference, many will choose the open source solution. Is price difference the only sensible reason to choose an open-source product? And is open sourcing their code always bad in business?

December 28, 2011 | Alex Berg: App Architectures and Data Delivery when Moving Mobile

Salesforce has had many phases of growth in its lifetime. These phases include: CRM in the cloud, social media monitoring, and the social enterprise. Salesforce is great at discovering the Next Big Thing. After discovering the Next Big Thing, Salesforce educates its clients and followers what it is, instructs how to best tap its potential, and provides the tools to do so on its platform. If you’ve listened to Salesforce’s recent releases and its developer’s actions, you’ll know that its Next Big Thing is mobile.

December 13, 2011 | Alex Berg: Salesforce’s Apex Runtime Design - Old vs New

The Force.com developer blog recently posted a notice to everyone with a developer edition organization. Starting last Friday, all Force.com Developer Edition organizations will use a new Apex runtime that compiles directly to Java bytecode, which will provide significant improvements in performance.

Of course, I was thrilled to hear about a performance boost, but this rose some questions for me. What was Apex code compiling to before this upgrade? Was it not using Java bytecode before?

November 25, 2011 | Alex Berg: Salesforce’s Two Application Platforms and Target Markets

I’d like to talk about Heroku and its relationship with Salesforce. Salesforce has spent much time and money to make its Force.com platform a great option for hosting your data-backed application. They have done a wonderful job with crafting a reliable platform, so why would they purchase another development platform like Heroku?

November 10, 2011 | Alex Berg: StratoSource - A Salesforce Deployment Tool

In my last post, I expressed some of the barriers to having a fully-automated deployment process from one Salesforce org to another. I’m not the only one who has frustrations with the existing process; there are many others. Some of these ‘others’ also happen to be avid software developers, as is evident by this new software tool created by Red Hat, and recently open sourced at Dreamforce 2011. It’s called StratoSource, and its raison d’être is to ease the manual labor of release managers and mistakes with deployments for the Force.com platform. While it is not the easiest tool to set up, it provides some very useful facilities to a release manager, and may be worth the time investment to get it set up.

November 06, 2011 | Alex Berg: The Problematic Deployment Process for Internal Salesforce Development

The IT development release process for a business’ internal Salesforce org is still half-baked. It is a manual, error-prone, time-consuming, and inefficient process. There is an efficient, automated process that development teams on other platforms use, so why not use it with Salesforce development?

October 29, 2011 | Alex Berg: The New, Yet Nascent, Debugger for Force.com Code

One point of discontent among Salesforce developers is the lack of a modern debugger. For a long time now, Salesforce has been talking about how they are working on creating a debugger for code on their platform, announcing their progress at each Dreamforce event. They have still not completely delivered this product. Considering the nature of the Force.com platform, however, this is a very difficult feat.