Design

A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex: 2. Abstraction

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This is part 3 in the series “A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex” and will cover the aspect of Abstraction. For other posts in this series see the links below. A Beginner’s Guide to Object-Oriented Programming with Apex What the hell is Abstraction? Abstraction is a very interesting and surprisingly simple concept. At its core it’s about context and if Abstraction were a company it’s motto would be “Provide the right tools and data at the right time.”. There are many analogies in the “real world” e.g. Where is this applicable to developers on the platform? Ever created a Visualforce component or Apex utility class? Well you my friend you are already using abstraction! This sounds a lot like Encapsulation! Abstraction and Encapsulation go hand in hand but they are different. Encapsulation is one of the ways you can achieve abstraction but does not encompass the entire concept. …

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Across the Pond with Shannon Hale

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Shannon is Senior Product Manager for Declarative Apps at Salesforce.com

@abhinavguptas and I were curious as to the identity of the creator of the SetupScripter, which is now incorporated into the salesforce.com Org setup menu. I dug around a bit and managed to uncover her real identity – community please meet Shannon Hale, Shannon Hale this is the community. She didn’t just stop with that wonderful piece of UX but has moved onto bigger and better things, but I’ll let her tell you about those.

If you’d like to learn more about the genius that is Shannon or just have a chat with her you can get her on twitter at @shannonsans or @bathtubdreamer. You can also check out her online presence at shannonsansserif.com and bathtubdreamer.com.

Onto the Q&A!

Who is Shannon Hale? How did you get into software development and UX design?

I started out as a writer, but in a different field — I wrote and edited for some independent Canadian music and culture magazines. I started technical writing to help pay the bills, and from there wandered through a series of tech positions: technical training, systems analysis and design, and software development. In 2001 I became obsessed with why a product I was coding was difficult to use, and began to independently study interaction design and user experience.

When I’m not being a complete geek — which I am even at home, I always have personal and volunteer web projects going on — I’m sewing, knitting, or binding books. I’m one of those people who always needs to be doing something with their hands.

Cloud Computing – A Programmer’s Implementation of Hardware and Software Infrastructure?

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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 …

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Salesforce: Programmatically Populating Sample Data Post-Deployment

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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.

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Announcing the Salesforce Handbook

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Recently, Jeff Douglas and I saw the potential for a beginner’s book – aimed at business owners, analysts and developers, that comprehensively documents Salesforce and Force.com. There is a tonne of documentation out there and we thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handbook that lightly summarised the most important areas of the platforms as well as offering some best practise advice”. We mulled it over for a time, and today we’d like to announce that we’re currently writing: The Salesforce Handbook A newcomer’s guide to building applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform. Hand-in-hand with the book we’ll be publishing content from the book on a WordPress site. Here you can expect to find excerpts from the book, but also content that supplements the book e.g. areas that’ll serve as best-practice hubs with links to official documentation, blog posts that rock the party, and even superb discussion forum …

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Friends Romans Country[wo]men

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In an attempt to attend DreamForce this year – I will conquer the Atlantic! – I’ve written up a white paper on a set of tools and workflows that I’ve found superb in more ways than one. I’d be happy & ecstatic(hapstatic?) if you could take a gander at my paper and, if it tickles your fancy, give it your vote. The idea itself describes the paper, but I failed to proof read it (and shock! Horror! There is no edit capability) so I’ll post a more refined version here,

Rapid application development is one of the strongest selling points of Salesforce and Force.com Platform; one that I’ve personally experienced time and time again. However, when it comes to translating that beautiful design document into a VisualForce interface, going from the design bits

The design document built from the 960.gs template

to a cross-browser, standards-compliant site prototype can be troublesome and often takes several days… and let’s be honest, potentially weeks.

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Salesforce API Integration Using SOAP-based Web Services

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Too Much Documentation (TMD) - The leading cause of baldness amongst men.

There are several tomes & tools to help you integrate with the platform; this article will concentrate on WSDL defined web services. Some help texts are specific to certain languages, others favour certain approaches but I’ve found there’s no short-and-sweet guide. As someone who’s nearly drowned in the documentation (including forums, tweets and blogs) I thought I’d try to save – at least some of you – the white-squall that is ‘Learning the basics of SFDC WSDL-based integration’.

I’ll be the first to admit that summarising such a broad topic can be difficult, so if I do miss anything out, y’all out there in the community just let me know.

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Salesforce: Polymorphism driven by Apex class inheritance

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Polywhatsthatnow? Polymorphism ” is the ability of one type, A, to appear as and be used like another type, B.”

It is a facet of OOP and can best be described using the good ol’ example of the ‘Shape’ class problem (thanks Java!). Let’s suppose we’d like to create an application that drew a number of shapes on a page. At the time of analysis we know that we want to immediately support circles, but to future-proof our application we need to support the drawing of any shapes. Being Pretty Darn Good Developers(tm) we realise we should create a Shape class that has a single method used to draw itself, and any specific shapes should be derived from this class, and override that method. Make sense? Didn’t think so.

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Flickr + jQuery + Salesforce = Awesome^5 [Part 2]

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Okay software developing enthusiasts, I’m back from Paris (you didn’t know I was gone did ya?), I’m a year older and culturally, I’m richer (well I’d like to think so at least). It’s time to complete our two-part series on integrating disparate systems using  the most-excellent combination of web services, jQuery and the Force.com platform. In part 1 we learnt how to connect to a third-party endpoint (Flickr in our case), and consume their SOAP-based web services. Now we’re going to jazz it all up with our spiffy jQuery gallery carousel. Let’s have another look at where we want to be at the end of this all,

GalleryView 2.0 Integration

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