The Silver Lining

This afternoon I gave a talk on the evolution of the cloud at the 3rd annual Cloud Computing World Forum in London. For those who attended (or anyone else!) here’s the slide deck.

I’ve worked with many Org instances in my career with salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform and was stunned by an Org that had a massive number of Roles, way beyond anything I’d ever seen before. This made me curious as to what other people were dealing with and I’m sure the result will be interesting.

Note: If you work with several Orgs and you have a high tolerance for boredom please submit an answer for each

Alert(). Old skool and not in a good way

I love JavaScript, and working within the Force.com Platform I’m always finding new ways that it can be applied to business needs. I know this is the case for many developers out there but I’ve seen that their typical development process is:

• Develop the JS code
• Create bug
• Include calls to the alert() method to troubleshoot
• Iterate

alert() is bad for debugging

I’m sure this process sounds familiar to many of you, but do you know what, the alert() method is a very weak way of troubleshooting. I abandoned it years back because of poor features such as outputting object representations as ‘[object]‘ or ‘[undefined]‘ – which doesn’t give you a lot to go on.

Meet console.log()

Modern browsers have access to a library called ‘console‘ which offers a far richer experience, and without the annoying pop-ups. The console.log() method accepts any JavaScript type as a parameter and will always give you detailed and sensible output. In the images below I’ve passed the method a variable representing a Div and the log outputs the entire DOM from the Div down. You can even pass it jQuery objects and it’ll output all of that object’s associated data!

Console. Unobtrusive with richer output.

Now that's what I call a debugger!

So where does it output to? On the console tab of course. I almost always use Chrome these days and you’ll find the console tab if you open Chrome’s Developer Tools. It’s similarly placed within Firebug for Firefox.

For those who’d like to learn more about the console library here’s an excellent article. There you’ll see that the library has far more to offer than just the log() method.

Debugging Custom JavaScript Button

A neat tip to remember is that console.log() is available wherever JavaScript is used on the platform. That means you can even debug the JavaScript you use to access the AJAX API through Custom Buttons!

Image via CrunchBase

I’m not going to get into the boilerplate code you’ll need in order to get OAuth up and running as it’s pretty straight forward, but I did run into a peculiar issue which took me some time to narrow down. To reproduce these steps you’ll need to:

1. Correctly setup OAuth between the Force.com Platform and LinkedIn
2. Authorise access to your LinkedIn account
3. Attempt to fetch a resource using an API endpoint such as: http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/network/updates?scope=self

When attempting to make the call out in step 3 you’ll get a “401 – Unauthorized” error. So to be clear OAuth is working perfectly but a call like this one will still result in the error.

After some troubleshooting I noticed that some API endpoints didn’t result in the error e.g. http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/id=abcdefg/network/updates?scope=self. At this point I realised the issue was probably the tilde (‘~’) character in the URI.

Grasping at straws I manually replaced the tilde with it’s URL friendly equivalent ‘%7E’ and the callout worked perfectly. Now this is strange because I am, in the course of making the callout, URL encoding all parts of the endpoint URL. It seems that for some reason the LinkedIn OAuth services needs to have the tilde encoded twice when signing the request :/

The face of TehNrd

Today I start a series of posts that’ll appear here and on the Tquila blog. The series will be in the format of Q&A with some of the finest Salesforce.com and Force.com evangelists, admins and developers. I’m starting with Jason Venable aka TehNrd and I’ll let him introduce himself.

Q: Tell me a bit about yourself. How long have you worked with the CRM vs the Force.com Platform? Were you always a developer?

A: My name is Jason Venable. I am 27 years old. I live in Seattle, Washington, USA. Oh, wait, you want something more interesting, got it. I’ve been working with salesforce.com CRM for a little over 4 years. Three of these years have also been working with force.com. All of this time has been administering and developing for a large enterprise salesforce.com deployment at F5 Networks. A lot of what I do is merging the two worlds of salesforce.com and force.com to meet business needs. This includes using all of the features force.com has to offer including, custom objects, validation rules, Apex code triggers, Visualforce pages, and web services to enhance and improve our companies use of salesforce.com.

Have I always been a developer? Heck no! If you told me I’d be doing coding and web app development 4 years ago I would have laughed at you. College classes that had me coding in notepad and some not so great experiences with the now dead s-controls left a bad taste in my mouth when it came to development. Then salesforce.com released Apex code and I saw how it could solve some of the problems we where facing. I taught myself the basics and the rest is history.

I also have a little blog related to all sorts of force.com goodness at tehnrd.com and some people follow around @TehNrd in Twitterland.

Q: What is your favourite type of development on the platform? What piece of work are you most proud of?

A: Databases design, triggers, and workflow are all cool but what I really like is building snazzy web apps. This has become even funner after jumping on the jQuery and jQueryUI bandwagon (disclaimer: I am a major jQuery fanboy). These JavaScript libraries allow you to make rich web apps with animations, drag & drop, and all sorts of other slick effects with minimal code. Pair this with Visualforce and the force.com database and you’ve got yourself a recipe for some great awesomesauce applications.

I think the coolest thing I’ve ever built on force.com was Gameforce. If anyone from salesforce.com reads this please don’t sue me for stealing your naming convention. Gameforce is a site built with force.com where you can play games. There is a single player black jack card game but what I think is even cooler is multiplayer Connect 4 and what I mean by multiplayer is two people on separate computers anywhere in the world. What I’m really proud of is this site is pure force.com. There is no flash, JavaScript, or any other tricks to handle the multiplayer game. You can check it out here.

Q: Where do you think “The Cloud” is headed?

A: I won’t even pretend to be the first person to say or think this, you talked about it here: http://tquilamockingbird.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/salesforce-com-crm-vs-oracle-ondemand/

But I really believe the younger generation will push adoption of the cloud to the next level. The CTOs and CEOs of today pick “the cloud” because it’s easy to manage, cheaper, and scalable. The CTOs and CEOs of tomorrow will choose cloud solutions for these same reasons but also because they know nothing else. Kids today use “the cloud” every day but don’t even realize it. Webmail, google docs, and mobile me to name a few. How many people under 20 use a local web client to check their personal mail, probably 3. How many people under 20 upload every picture they take to Flickr or Facebook and then don’t worry about the local copy, a lot. When it is time for these kids to choose solutions that solve business problems they will look to “the cloud” without even realizing “the cloud” is something new and useful. To them it will be their norm and the way things have always been.

Q: Which of the Spice Girls do you most closely identify with?

A: Of course the one living in UK has to work in a Spice Girls question. A secret fan you are perhaps? I’m not that scary and I’m not a baby. I don’t have red hair and I haven’t played organized sports in over 9 years. So in some strange way I think I just identified myself as relating the closest to Posh spice. Oh boy, I’m not going to be able to live this one down. I’m definitely not snobby or upscale but the other day someone said I had cool shoes so I guess that makes me stylish and poshy? Posh Dev!

Q: What advice do you have for beginners on the Force.com platform?

A: For beginners the Force.com Workbooks are a great resource. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Forcedotcomworkbook I am super jealous these didn’t exist when I first started. They are clear, concise, and walk you through the steps of building a full blown application. I also hear pretty good things about the Salesforce Handbook. apparently two guys that know a thing or two about salesforce.com and force.com development wrote it. The forums at developer.force.com are also a great place to hang out. When I first started doing force.com development the forums where the only resource available and the community helped me solve problems that ranged from the “simple face palm I can’t believe it was that easy” problems to the “holy smokes there is no way on earth I would have ever figured this out on my own” problems.

Q: Do you by any chance know of a better way to peel an orange?

A: Funny you ask because I actually do know the most superior method in the entire universe on how to consume an orange… http://www.tehnrd.com/the-best-way-to-eat-an-orange/

This is a cross-post from the Tquila blog.

My Favourite Chart Type

Not having analytics built into your public sites is much like having a Q&A site but not allowing people to answer. In this case some of the questions are:

• Where did you come from?
• How long did you stick around for?
• Where did you hang out on your visit?

Now I’m not going to debate which set of analytics is best but I did come across a few quirks when setting Google Analytics (GA) up for wesnolte.com that I suspect are fairly universal.

Build a Site

This of course is quite a big step and I’m going to assume you’re just about done. To get analytics up and running though you’re going to have to do a few extra bits.

Don't hack me pls.

1. Sign up for a GA account, create a Website Profile and you’ll receive an Analytics Code. My code has been blocked out in orange in the image alongside, your code should appear in it’s place.
2. Insert the standard Google Analytics Visualforce component into your page.
3. Enter the same Analytics Code as above on the Force.com Site Detail page – the field is called “Analytics Tracking Code”.

If you go back to your Analytics home page and refresh you’ll see a little warning sign that tells you something is amiss – and it is but it’s difficult to figure out just what that something is.

S.O.S

The problem in this case is that the default robots.txt file for Force.com Sites blocks all bots. This is not a bad idea but it’s not obvious when setting all this up.

Michaelforce and myself seemed to have had these pains at the same time and he posted his findings here. You’ll need to apply step 3 from his post to allow GA to peek at your site.

Now in my particular case I did all of this and GA was still not able to access my site so I threw in the towel and coded the GA JavaScript straight into my page. A few days later however I realised that the robots.txt was probably caching so I ripped out that funky ol’ JavaScript, plugged the Visualforce component back in and BHAM! It worked. Now I know that exactly 5 people visit my site per day, and that 4 of them of from the UK

Some Advice

My analytics are working a charm but I’ve realised there’s a snag. Since salesforce.com doesn’t allow you access to their nameservers you have to point your root domain to your Force.com Site using URL forwarding at the domain registrar’s side i.e. I can use a CNAME to point www.wesnolte.com to my Force.com site but wesnolte.com has to bounce to my registrars forwarding server before it finally hits the real site. What this means is that – to GA – the traffic directly to wesnolte.com looks like it’s all coming from one source, that is the forwarding server. The only way that I know to work around this is to get people to only use the www.domain.com form of your URL – not ideal I know.

Geeks - so efficient even lunch only takes half the time.

Yes, it’s a sweeping statement, and the comparison I’ll make probably doesn’t fill every nook and cranny but it’s just so darn tasty that I had to quickly knock something out. I think that the developer collective have a massive influence over the direction of software evolution, and therefore it’s underlying technologies. In times gone past the influence probably wasn’t so large (or was it Mr Turing?), but with the rise and rise of the Socially Networked era I think the effect has snowballed.

So where is my justification? Well it lies primarily in anecdote – yes yes I hear your nerdy cries you sons & daughters of empirical science, but hear me out m’kay. We, the developers, spend probably more time online than even an opposite-sex obsessed teen does on facebook (yes, I know it’s part of the internet). We search and we scrounge, getting easily bored and looking for the next interesting tidbit, that scrap of information that will make us better programmers or just entertain us. We take the weak, inefficient and uninteresting and toss it aside while rolling The Good Stuff ™ into our work thereby influencing something as small as the font-family used in the corporate intranet, to something as grand as your start-ups Next Big Idea.

I’ve waxed lyrical but I’d like to get down-right specific. Some large parallels can be drawn between the world of OOP and the advent of Cloud Computing, and it is primarily for this reason that I suspect that some developers somewhere (past or present) were key in architecting what we today call Cloud Computing. OOP is by no means the alpha-and-omega of programming philosophy but it was a fundamental and incredibly intelligent paradigm shift – as is Cloud Computing. My comparison is made by drawing parallels with 2 of the main tenets of OOP.

Encapsulation

Encapsulation can be defined as an information hiding mechanism – and I don’t mean in a Wikileaks expose kind of way. Broadly this is described as:

the internal representation of an object is generally hidden from view outside of the object’s definition. Typically, only the object’s own methods can directly inspect or manipulate its fields.

To those familiar with Cloud Computing the correlation is immediately apparent. As a customer of Cloud XYZ I expect the provider to deal with all of the infrastructure setup and maintenance while providing interfaces that let me create applications or host servers or whatever. For example, if I’m using GAE I don’t really need to know how many servers you have or the amount of RAM that each has installed, I just need to know that I can develop, build, deploy and run my application and that it will scale well.

Cloud Computing hides the implementation of the tools that you need in order to complete development whilst providing interfaces to these tools that make this possible.

Abstraction

Single Rainbow! WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!

For those unfamiliar with the concept it can be quite… abstract. Examples always help:

Abstraction is simplifying complex reality by modelling classes appropriate to the problem, and working at the most appropriate level of inheritance for a given aspect of the problem.
For example, Lassie the Dog may be treated as a Dog much of the time, a Collie when necessary to access Collie-specific attributes or behaviors, and as an Animal (perhaps the parent class of Dog) when counting Timmy’s pets.

All of the clouds together i.e. all those platforms ending in “aaS” can be seen to form the highest level of abstraction. If you need a platform to host your Ruby applications then you’d starting shopping for a PaaS. Once your platform is chosen then you deal with the next layer of abstraction which might be concepts/requirements such as database space, CPU time and amount of RAM. The next layer might then be the application itself and so on and so forth.

Cloud Computing takes complex systems and breaks them into easy to digest chunks. By organising these into abstracted layers (imagine zoom-levels on a map) you can concentrate on, and understand, the level of information most applicable to your situation.

It is largely accepted that there are 2 more core principles of OOP namely Inheritance and Polymorphism. While parallels with Cloud Computing can be drawn for these two concepts I don’t think they’re as revolutionary as Encapsulation and Abstraction. Perhaps you disagree and if you do I’d love to hear your explanations.

So you’ve said some stuff and now I should believe you?

Of course not, but if you’re a developer I’m going to bet my bottom dollar (pound) that this makes sense to you; and not only does it make sense but you can see how big an improvement it really is. I have the utmost respect for those bigwigs in management as well as those well-dressed consultants, but for me I cannot see this type of vision being born anywhere else except in the mind of someone who’s gotten stuck into meaty application development and application architecture. Who ever it was, and where ever they may be, I salute them (live long and prosper).

I’m not sure if this concept is obvious when reading my previous post, so I thought I’d run through it with a specific example.

Rule one of packaging - Finish your bolognese first!

Let’s say that you’ve created what can only be described as an exemplary application in the form of a Managed Package. Although your user interface is beyond compare, you’d also like to populate some of your core objects with example data. Some options that immediately spring to mind are:

1. Get the person that installs the package to call you, and you can do it post-installation.
2. Get the person that installs the package to create sample data manually post-installation.
3. Give the user a “Start Here” page with a call-to-action – such as a commandButton – that fetches the data from some API and parses into object data.

Option 3 is pretty excellent, especially now that you can package Remote Site Settings but I think we can do one better. And when I say better I mean simpler and with fewer potential points of failure. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure a lot of you have this documented somewhere but I’ve recently discovered that it’s quite difficult to find an obvious reference to this knowledge on the interwobbles. So how would you create a Generic SObject at run-time? It’s rather easy thankfully:

String sObjectName = 'MyObject__c';
Schema.SObjectType t = Schema.getGlobalDescribe().get(sObjectName);
SObject s = t.newSObject();

If you require this type of functionality quite often I’d suggest putting it in a utility class.

Okay book’s done, now where were we? Oh yes software development, right? Programming software engineering application development h4x0R-ing. Oh how I’ve missed getting my mitts dirty so without further ado…

Now this one goes right about... here!

Some time back Custom Settings were introduced on the Force.com Platform and we all star-jumped in the air, w00ting to anyone who would listen. Up till this point – if you’re anything like me – you were using custom objects to hold configuration data, whether this be lists of language-codes, or operational settings such at outbound web service endpoints, usernames, passwords etc. With Custom Settings you finally had a place to put this information – a home if you will – for your lonely, orphaned Control Data.

Quite quickly however I realised there was still a gaping hole that could be filled with Custom Settings but just didn’t feel right. Lists of data (such as currency codes and descriptions) fit really well into this structure but more serious Control Data that you only need to be listed once-off (such as important URLs, flags to active/deactive modules in your application, usernames and passwords) just don’t seem like they really belong with this other crowd. A quick list of reasons highlights this:

• Control Data is typically entered once off and creating an entire Custom Setting for a single line of data feels like a waste.
• Custom Settings are data so they can’t be deployed with code, they must be created after the fact. Control Data should be a little more important than regular data, it needs a smarter vehicle than plain-old data entry.
• If you’re creating packages you want as much autonomy for your clients as possible. If you use custom settings there will have to be that “Create data in Custom Setting X__c” step in each and every deployment. Read the rest of this entry »