Most enterprise software vendors in the market
are subject to the requirements and demands of the developer communities they are serving. And in all truth, Salesforce is coming into its own as a cloud-based platform and solution. The reason for this is simple – their developer community.
Over the last few years, if you visit Salesforce’s Dreamforce events you will notice a large crowd in the developer zone. In this area, you’ll notice a band of developers with mild skepticism, looking at the new enhancements with a keen eye to find out how these affect their code, improve functionality or extend the previous limits of the force.com platform.
This kind of healthy skepticism is something every vendor will be well served in having, and is what has led to many of the strides Salesforce is making in enhancing the capabilities of its platform, the best example of which is the governor limit changes in the API (Application Programmer Interface). Regardless of the APEX and SOQL downsides, countless developers continue to flock into their developer forums.
People need to appreciate these developer forums for what they really are: the seeding ground for future applications and enhancements. Even though the partner ecosystem is quite vibrant, as demonstrated by the Cloud Expo, tomorrow’s apps are being born in the developer are today.
A perfect example of this is the force.com Workbook that was released last October by the developer community, as well as the Force.com REST API Developer’s Guide released soon after that.
Moving from platform to application
Back to the Dreamforce event developer area thing; Careful analysis of the goings-on in the developer area at Dreamforce annual event shows that Salesforce is making huge leaps towards moving from a simple enterprise application to a cloud based platform. Consider the following:
- The quality and quantity of developers Dreamforce events is on a steep climb. There is an improvement in the level of sophistication of code samples, depth of questions raised and calls for further enhancements to the governor limits and more robust mobile support.
- Steady improvement of app development environments, visual design tools and support for Apache Cordova, jQuery and Sencha.
- The Salesforce Touch mobile dev platform is maturing, along with their Platform Mobile Services. From the 2011 launch, the platform as matured significantly, thanks to the push of the developer community’s needs which is a reflection of the end user’s needs. There is support for HTML5, leading to a creation of accurate, fast and ideal apps for the end user community. For instance, ServiceMax have an brilliant mobile app out based on the Force.com platform.
- The 2012 launch of the Mobile Enterprise Developer. Today’s enterprise customers are much more active than they were a few years back. They needed something more from Salesforce – a way to develop web services that could integrate customer data and legacy systems.
For these reasons and more, developers realize the benefits of having Force.com platform based native apps for their organizations. It’s more than just about the market spin. Force.com actually presents notable advantages, particularly in relation to solutions that are intended for global deployment and/or am extremely large end-user community. Author Bio: The writer has vast experience as a Force.com developer and enterprise data specialist, with knowledge about Salesforce partial data sandbox and other Salesforce applications. For more details, contact them below.