Salesforce’s Spring ‘11 Release Is Bringing Further Developer Enhancements

The Salesforce.com Spring ‘11 release is coming soon, and with it some much needed improvements to governor limits and unit testing.

Two of my biggest issues with developing on the Force.com platform are governor limits and unit tests. Both can make developing on this platform challenging and frustrating. Unit tests can take a long time to run, and are often challenging to write, especially when large amounts of test data needs to be created. Governor limits make developing larger applications very difficult because they limit the amount of data you can pull as well as the amount of processing you can perform on that data.

Governor limits will now run in a single context. That means that there won’t be different limits for triggers than there are for controllers, or asynchronous classes. Often times, we would need to write an asynchronous method that was called from a trigger, just to avoid the lower governor limits of triggers. That should no longer be necessary as they will all have the same limits after Spring ‘11. Another improvement is the limits are going up again. The limit for DML statements has gone from 20 in triggers and 100 in other contexts, to 150 for all! This should help tremendously when developing larger applications.

Uniting test will now be able to be run in the background. While I feel this change is less significant, it is still a step in the right direction. I have some very code heavy organizations, and running the unit tests can take a long time. 

For more information on the upcoming changes in Spring ‘11, check out the release website.