How to rapidly develop apps using Salesforce platform

What is the Salesforce platform?

Salesforce Platform is a convenient option for all developers who want to develop and deploy apps really quick. It has all the automatic tools and ready to use services within the platform that speed up the app development process. Salesforce is currently in the process of maturing as a full cloud platform. It is a platform that is becoming extremely popular amongst developers. They are utilizing it to the optimum for rapid development of apps that are secure, reliable, and functional for quick delivery to enterprises worldwide.

 

Enterprises offering the SaaS model, (a model where the software applications are hosted by a service provider and customers can access it over the Internet) are facing challenges of creating tailored apps for a wide number of customers specific to their businesses. Hence they have decided to give access only to the services by allowing them to be accessed through different API’s. The intent is to make developers build custom applications by incorporating only specific and relevant services that the SaaS enterprises offer.

 

Introduction to Salesforce Platform’s training site: Trailhead

Salesforce offers a self-paced training site named Trailhead. It has eleven different self learning modules

1. 1. Admin Trail for Beginners that is around 9 hours of journey to learning the basics of customizing Salesforce.

2. 2. Admin Trail – Migrate to lightening experience 3 and a half hour journey to increase productivity of your sales team by migrating your team to lightening experience.

3. 3. Developer Trail Beginner – Use current development skills to build apps faster with salesforce in 15 hours.

4. 3. Developer Trail Beginner – Use current development skills to build apps faster with salesforce in 15 hours.

5. 4. Developer Trail Intermediate – Powerful integration and mobile tools knowledge in just approx 11 hours.

6. 5. Developer Trail – Lightening experience build apps with visualforce, components and new design resources in 10 and ½ hours.

7. 6. Developer Trail – Mobile SDK create your own Ios, Android or hybrid mobile apps using salesforce1 platform in flat 7 hours.

8. 7. Admin Trail Intermediate – Point click tools to solve business issues in 7 hours.

9. 8. Admin Trail CRM – Learn Salesforce and its navigation, customization and basic CRM features in 1 and ½ hours.

10. 9. Admin Trail Starting with Lightening Experience – Become a new salesforce admin with Lightening Experience in just 3 hours.

11. 10. Sales Rep Trail – using Lightening Experience – Learn to use Salesforce to sell lightening fast in few clicks in just 2 hours.

12. 11. Dreamforce Trail – find all the #df15 resources to get the most out of it in just 30 mins.

The approach is different and lets Salesforce tracks what developers are trying to learn, and lets it view popular areas of the service. Each module has specific number of hours for completion. That lets you decide what and how much needs to be learnt at your own pace. After completion of each module there is a set of questions with multiple choices for reviewing your own progress and to earn points and badges.

 

It is easy to set up a developer instance of Salesforce. You just need an email address and you can get access to all the developer tools, and a limited version of the Salesforce platform.

 

Building your apps leveraging Force.com IDE

Just like other products in the Market, Salesforce has its developer tool that is the Force.com Integrated Development Environment which is based on Eclipse. With Salesforce’s Apex language, Force.com IDE is the most preferred development tool combination. The main intention of using this combination is the advantage Apex has to offer. It is designed to facilitate customizations in Salesforce workflows and integrate it with other third party or external applications.

 

Basic principles of Apex are much similar to those of SQL stored procedures. This tool is robust and lets you explore Salesforce beyond its CRM capacity, which helps built new complex and custom business processes.

 

Apex needs you to have a good understanding of database development since it is a little different from application programming and requires you to know most underlying database concepts and its programming constructs will seem familiar. There options where you can attach Apex code to the Salesforce fields that help you to add new business logic to an existing process.

 

Just similar to database programming Apex code is also launched by triggers and will be executed only when certain actions run. To check if your code is running as desired it is necessary to build unit test for the code. Apex applications are not deployed if less than a certain percentage around 75% of your code is covered by unit tests, and when all those tests need to pass before code deployment. Tests are an integral part of deployment with Apex.

 

Salesforce offers another important tool that is related to Apex, Visualforce markup language. It is a component-based user interface framework for the Force.com platform. The framework includes a tag-based markup language, similar to HTML. It offers developers all the necessary tools to build MVC apps on the Salesforce platform, with Salesforce and Apex code catering to the model and Visualforce markup language delivering the controller. The controller can either be a standard Salesforce inbuilt function or a custom code that has been written using Apex and the markup for views. Since Visualforce language has code that is delivered as HTML, it works on most browsers that are standard, and you can embed HTML in Visualforce apps.

 

Rapid Application building

Salesforce platform includes an interesting feature which is its Lightning App Builder. This builder is automated and is truly designed to enable developers to build their own Salesforce applications which can work on both desktops as well as mobile devices. There are basic templates that it offers with which the developers can quickly link page elements to Salesforce.com services as well as the content, which is then ready to be delivered to the mobile devices.

 

Salesforce’s Lightning App Builder is a fast and easy tool that empowers any admin to allow developers to build the apps that they want to create. Developers have options of adding Pages to Salesforce1 mobile app, they do appear as extra navigation items. Salesforce provides a choice of common actions and page components for Lightning Apps, where the developer can create or build custom components that can be sold to other users on Salesforce’s AppExchange.

 

Salesforce has fully bloomed as a Platform and has exceeded being just a CRM service provider. No doubt the basis of the platform is still the CRM data model, it’s an entire platform that allows access to various tools and IDE to build a wider range of customer-centric applications. Salesforce is one of the best platforms available in the market today which offers a pick of tools to help you build bespoke applications that your business requires.

 

Hope you are on your way to start building customer centric cusmtom apps using Salesforce Platform. And if you are not ready yet, you can go through the Trailhead sessions, earn points, learn quickly and start building your own custom apps for desktops and mobile devices.