Salesforce: Force.com Sites and Google Analytics

This is a cross-post from the Tquila blog. 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. Sign up for a GA account, create a Website Profile and you’ll receive an Analytics Code. My code has been blocked out …

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GWT: Common Exceptions – NoClassDefFoundError

This seems to be a problem that nearly everyone hits when starting with GWT. It causes confusion because the code is error free at compile time, yet throws a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError exception at runtime. The problem is simple to correct. You’ll probably have included the required library into your build path already and that’s why you’re not getting compile time errors. The additional step that is to have the JAR-file(s) that contain the required libraries be copied to your project’s war/WEB-INF/lib directory. Note that your JAR-files must exist in the root of this directory, and not in any sub-directories.

Force.com vs GAE + GWT

Salesforce could be regarded as the cloud computing leader but history tells us that many-a-giant has fallen before. Apple has; Microsoft has; IBM has. I think Salesforce is still on the up ‘n up, but there are contenders out there and some of them are noteworthy; probably the most obvious of these is Google. Over the past few months I’ve dug into the Google cloud platform and I thought it was time to attempt a side-by-side comparison of my two favourite PaaS providers.

The bigger they are ...

Some quick definitions are probably in order:

Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service offering from Salesforce, the first of its kind allowing developers to build multi tenant applications that are hosted on their servers as a service.

Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java.

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An Introduction

Salesforce.com is an ever increasing presence on the interweb. They’re leaders in a market that promises to be the next generation of software development, that of cloud computing. Google, Amazon and Mosso are some other names that have realised the current and potential power of developing and/or hosting in the cloud and it’s an area that I’m glad to be involved in from so early on.

Although this tech is not new, it is still young, and I’ve started this blog as a way to contribute to the growing community of Cloud Computing developers. The teething problems are still quite apparent in this industry, and as someone who’s been heavily involved in the technology for some time, I’m starting to see how problematic certain aspects of this type dev are(although the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks).

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