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Salesforce vs Microsoft: What is the Best Platform for Business App Development

Nik Skliarov — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 09:53:45 +0000

Salesforce vs Microsoft: What is the Best Platform for Business App Development

Why are entrepreneurs and executives of large enterprises demanding more functionality, more scalability, more mobility today? Businesses can’t grow without nurturing customers, and consumer expectations have changed dramatically in recent times. People expect seamless customer support along with smooth purchase experience via their preferred means of communication – mobile phones. But beyond the direct connection with your clients, mobile applications are vastly extending software capabilities.

When searching for the development platform, entrepreneurs choose either the simplest one to deal with or the platform that gives access to the very best ecosystem. Salesforce & Microsoft are leading players in the platform-ecosystem world, offering serious assets for entrepreneurs and developers alike. Both are aiming to be a comprehensive solution to serve the growing business needs: from CRM technology offerings to robust cloud app development tools to AI-based products.

The two tech giants are archrivals with a long story of struggling for the business software market leadership. Microsoft dominated the enterprise app market for a long time, but Salesforce reshaped it with cloud offerings, changing the game for older software providers. The company built a billion-dollar empire from CRM following the main idea: deliver software round the clock to people over the cloud. It took Microsoft pretty much time and billions of investments to enter the SaaS market where Salesforce was a king. The fierce competition on various cloud fronts required constant improvements from all players.

So, let’s figure out which platform is a better choice not only from the technology perspective but as an environment to build a high-growth business.

Development tools and experience

The main Salesforce developer instrument is Force.com or Lightning Platform that accelerates app creation and makes it more efficient. The PaaS platform incorporates the tools – from low code to code – Heroku, SalesforceDX, App Builder, Lightning Flow – dramatically speeding up the building process while allowing for high-level customization and configuration.

Low code capabilities

Low code tools provide many benefits and open up an enormous opportunity to get non-technical employees involved in the application development process. At the same time, coders get the flexibility to customize complex data integrations, logic, UI via hand-programming.

Gartner recognized the importance of low-coding when it released a Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms in 2019. Salesforce tops the Leaders quadrant, showing persistent growth and innovation. Microsoft was in the Challengers quadrant in 2018 and jumped to the Leaders only in 2019.

With Lightning App Builder, the employees with no prior coding experience or development know-how can create responsive business applications that work on desktops & mobile phones. There is an entire library of pre-built components that can be easily assembled into an app, with the option of creating custom components, reuse them in other applications or publish on the AppExchange, Salesforce app marketplace. Your Lightning Apps auto-connect with all your data stored on the platform, simplifying the developer’s job.

Lightning Flow is another declarative tool that empowers users to create business process automation for apps through Process Builder & Flow Builder point-and-click functionality. Innovative technologies like AI-powered analytics tool Einstein can be seamlessly embedded into your software while IoT Explorer Edition allows you to build solutions on top of IoT data.

Microsoft’s alternative is the Power Platform, a low-code environment that allows non-technical users to build custom applications, user interfaces, business workflows. It isn’t a product on its own, but rather a group of products: PowerApps, Power Automate, and Power BI.

PowerApps is a low-code solution that brings the power of process automation to the business audience. It’s quite possible to construct mobile apps by adding different controls and screens via a drag-and-drop UI if you have at least some technical understanding. Power Automate serves for the creation of automated workflows between your software and third-party applications. Leveraging the Power BI tool for data analytics, you can draw data visualizations and connect external data sources.

Developer Experience

PowerApps’s biggest strength is its compatibility with a wide range of Microsoft products & Office applications. However, there are very few options to tweak code. The product is perfect for building some simple apps such as contact lists or mobile surveying applications. But it’s not the best choice if you demand heavy customization of a project.

Lightning’s “design once, use anywhere” approach for desktop and mobile interfaces accelerate business processes, allowing end-users to easily interact with applications. Point-and-click features can be used to not only just build business logic but also access developer-built code. Advanced users and programmers can customize workflows and integrate it with external sources using Apex language. Yet newcomers will require the training to build highly customized applications.

Solutions for complex custom business processes

For experienced coders, Salesforce offers a powerful but more technically challenging development tool Heroku, which supports popular programming languages: Ruby, Java, PHP, Node, etc. Heroku is a cloud service platform that takes care of hardware, operating systems, servers, allowing developers to concentrate on creating software rather than infrastructure. Focused on building consumer-facing apps, Heroku enables simple application development and deployment as well.

The PaaS provider recognizes the demands for traditional development methods to address the business requirements for more complex solutions. Catering to conventional developers, Salesforce launched a cutting-edge environment, which is committed to providing the needed support and tools. SalesforceDX boosts developer productivity with modern life-cycle management tools that enable true version control, improved team collaboration, and agile development. Combining features from Force.com and Heroku Flow, all functionality is pulled into one place additionally enhanced with continuous integration capabilities. Note, that DX primarily targets the conventional developers with strong coding skills and knowledge of open programming languages like Node or Java.

SalesforceDX features & tools

Salesforce Command-Line Interface (CLI) helps in retrieving metadata, creating a project, exporting & importing data, and manipulating scratch orgs. This tool makes it much easier and more pleasant to develop custom solutions.
Scratch orgs are lightweight environments for development and testing that you can launch on-demand. They are essentially mini developer orgs that allow working upon a different piece of work independently. This is the killer feature in enabling more traditional dev workflow and version control as a source of truth. You can use these orgs as a temporary environment to make changes and destroy them with a single script when done. It helps build your app consistently over and over again, which is great for team collaboration and test automation.
Version Control System (VCS) is a mechanism for keeping track of your code. VCS serves as a backup in case you need to roll back to previous versions of your software and supports collaboration with your team.
Continuous Integration (CI)-enabling features: automated deployments off of GitHub repositories allows keeping track of any changes in your code and traceback code snippets to a specific point of time. Integration with Heroku Flow that supports orgs as a target environment means you can build out a deployment pipeline that can make changes from your VCS and promote them between environments.

Installing Visual Studio Code, a lightweight open-source editor for engineering and debugging cloud applications is necessary if you want to leverage features like SalesforceDX. VS Code with the Salesforce supported extensions like Apex, Visualforce, Aura Components, Apex Interactive Debugger, Apex Replay Debugger make interacting with SFDX commands hassle-free.

All these tools and features along with Heroku pipelines and CI play a crucial role in making the developer tasks easier, deployment faster, project management painless.

Microsoft Azure: Tools & Services

Azure is a cloud computing service that provides resources a business needs to run all or part of operations virtually, including storage, networking, analytics, engineering, deploying, and managing cloud-designed apps. You have the option of scaling resources according to business requirements.

Visual Studio is the full-featured tool for coding, which is used primarily for .NET & C# languages and is only available on Windows. Don’t confuse it with the VS Code, which is an open-source editor. Beyond these integrated development environments, you can use a range of language-specific SDKs for creating software in a programming language of your choice.

Developers can leverage different Azure Services based on their needs, project scale, etc. So let’s take a look at the core services intended to facilitate cloud-native app development.

Azure DevOps

This hosted service helps development teams improve project management, modernize release processes, optimize operational activities when creating and deploying software either in the cloud or on-premise. Azure provides an all-in-one DevOps toolchain to ensure efficient, secure, and collaborative work on the projects while removing technical and bureaucratic hurdles. Some key tools available include:

Git repositories for source control
Language and cloud-neutral CI/CD automation platform
Agile tools covering Kanban/Scrum project methodologies
Custom dashboards for planning, tracking, reporting
Test plans support advanced test management solutions for customer feedback and automation testing

Azure App Service

This PaaS solution from Microsoft intends to be the dedicated one-stop-shop for cloud-based software engineering. App Service is a big family of services for developing web apps, mobile backends, and RESTful APIs. This allows a developer to focus on creating applications, not on running it. The platform is a set of services, each bringing something unique to the table. It includes:

Web Apps tool assists with building and running web & API applications in Azure without having to deploy, configure, or maintain them
Mobile Apps help create backend logic in C# or Node and implement mobile features like data storing or sending push notifications. This service allows building cross-platform & native apps that run on Windows, Android, or IOS.
API Apps for simple logic workflows creation due to the pre-built connectors
Logic Apps introduces a serverless architecture for various services to be integrated into an app without writing codes but via connections to SaaS software and on-premise data

Azure Data Services

Azure covers a wide range of data-related needs for cloud-designed apps when near-zero administration and enterprise-grade capabilities are key. Developers can utilize either SQL or NoSQL data services for file storage, text searching, time-series data based on the application demand. Cosmos DB is a top Azure cloud computing offering for globally scalable projects. This multi-model database enables you to elastically scale throughput and storage, and enjoy fast data access using popular APIs.

This isn’t a full list of services that businesses can employ. Azure proposes an array of computing, databases, analytics services for building powerful enterprise solutions.

Click over code vs .NET programming customization

In the .NET environment, you can create custom layouts, design your theme, and handle all the user experience via hand programming. Also, you need to have a sound code knowledge to design interfaces that scale across multiple devices on .NET.

On the other hand, Salesforce’s overriding proposition is that it provides tons of capabilities out of the box, enabling endless customization without coding. First configure, then customize using declarative tools and extensions as per requirements. Its Lightning Design System allows creating layouts and user interfaces rapidly by dragging and dropping ready-to-use components. Applications built with Lightning automatically scale for mobile & desktop screen sizes. Tools for data analytics and reporting can be either created and embedded without code. This approach requires less developer force because non-technical users and admins can cope with this.

Training support

Another Salesforce’s significant asset is the educational network Trailhead. A gamified, free learning platform allows users to acquire the skills needed to be anything from an advanced user to an Administrator or a Developer. Whether you are a beginner or advanced, there are thousands of paths everyone can find the one to benefit from. Trailhead appeals to developers and business users like no other platform. There are even modules and trails guiding .NET developers to pick up Apex language. Beyond the educational content, you can put the acquired skills to the practice on Trailhead Playground for hands-on experience. Starting as a novice you can grow to a qualified developer.

Microsoft Learn is a direct response to Trailhead. The online educational center takes the principles and elements of gamification that are being used by Salesforce. The platform features guided and interactive courses where you earn badges for completing specific tasks. There are lots of Learning modules you can take, including Dynamics, Azure, Power BI, and more. The possibility to integrate content from LinkedIn Learning is the major strength of the platform.

The education and support of developers are critically important for a healthy developer ecosystem. While Microsoft has big ambitions for training support, Salesforce has been successfully growing certified admins and devs for years.

Ecosystems

Salesforce discovered that their consumers didn’t need software, but the solutions tailored to their specific needs. When custom software development was a costly way of growing business, the vendor built the business model on the partnership to address this issue. The cloud software provider cooperates with hundreds of independent software vendors, integrators, and consultants who support the technology and drive innovation for all of the users.

Salesforce operates the largest enterprise app marketplace, AppExchange. By opening up the platform to third-party vendors, the number of software complete solutions, applications, add-ons rose sharply. Currently, it offers over 5,000 apps paid and free of charge for clients to extend the functionality. The company applies rigorous approval processes, so be sure the apps are security-tested and peer-reviewed. Additionally, there is a large section of certified consulting partners who can help you with the development and listing of your own application on the leading marketplace.

Finally, the Trailblazer Community provides an environment for customers and partners to get answers and feedback on a product and share ideas. Altogether, Salesforce supports a growing ecosystem of technology partners, consultants, and customers that solve vital business problems.

Microsoft has spent a lot of time catching up with Salesforce. Microsoft AppSource ecosystem of third-party applications bears a sticking resemblance to AppExchange.

The marketplace offers the majority of apps as a try-before-purchase through a free trial option, so the user can find out if the app provides the capabilities they are looking for. AppSource provides two types of SaaS apps:

Add-ons & extensions to the existing products; it can be a simple single-purpose feature, such as a mapping tool in an Office product or extensions such as a full module with a set of functionality for shipping management, for instance.
Solution Apps are developed by ISVs to cover broader industry solutions. The listed applications offer a free trial and integration with Azure, Power BI, and other products.

Launched four years ago, AppSource lists approximately 6,000 apps and is evolving fast. Yet in Microsoft’s eagerness to turn it into something big quickly, they lowered the bar to entry for third-party developers, and it promptly filled up with low-quality software. From apps that will not even install to some that are downright security risks.

Gartner offers the serious cautions in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service 2019 regarding some of the platform imperfections.

The caution warns about the challenges with on-time implementations within the budget faced by Gartner customers, indicating that Microsoft sets unreasonably high expectations. Also, consumers complain about poor-quality technical support and field solution architects.

These implications are concerning even companies that predominantly use Microsoft.

Key takeaways

Microsoft is a new player to SaaS and PaaS markets, but we should admit that it evolves by leaps and bounds in this direction. Facing the market leader, the company chose to pursue the way that has proved to be successful. PowerApps, Microsoft Learn, and AppSource are still in the early days and lack the functionality and capabilities of Salesforce mature products. Their great advantage is in seamless integration with all the Microsoft tools and services. Known to many programs like Excel, SharePoint, Skype, Word, Outlook are now linked together and easily accessed via any of Microsoft cloud products. Although Salesforce does integrate with the same Office apps, it cannot touch the seamlessness of Microsoft integration. However, this is a drop in the ocean compared to what Salesforce offers.

Partner relationships, self-service training, advanced development tools, and enterprise value form a robust ecosystem for entrepreneurs, startups, and organizations that want to evolve quickly and strategically. Salesforce technology and services are centered around customer needs. Following their Clicks over Code concept, the vendor created an easy to use platform focused on the latest technologies that cover the needs of both business users and professional coders. Leveraging the tremendous opportunities of platform-ecosystem, you can build not just an enterprise application but a high-growth business.

Whether you need technical advice or a certified consultation on your product roadmap, you can always get in touch with Salesforce partners like Technology Grounds. We understand the business challenges you face and can help you build a solution that combines the best of strategy and technology.

The post Salesforce vs Microsoft: What is the Best Platform for Business App Development appeared first on Technology Grounds .

Why Choose Salesforce for Website Development: Top 5 Reasons

Nik Skliarov — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 15:40:45 +0000

Why Choose Salesforce for Website Development: Top 5 Reasons

If you are serious about taking your business to the next level, you cannot overlook Salesforce. The unique combination of both SaaS and PaaS services offering from a single vendor formed a new level of flexibility of websites & apps development, where minimum prior coding is required. Cloud computing is dominating the current market, with Salesforce being featured as one of the largest platforms for business software development.

Before we dive into the advantages of using this technology as your website platform, let’s figure out what we are talking about.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the world’s leader in the cloud services industry that specializes in CRM. It is a SaaS (Software as a Service) company, which hosts the applications on its servers and makes them available to clients over the Internet from any device. The provider offers various products for users and developers to build and distribute custom software via a subscription model.

What is Force.com?

Force.com is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) product, which is owned by Salesforce.com. This platform allows developing and deploying websites easier, faster, smoother to its multi-tenant servers. It also enables you to customize applications, business logic, and user interface with a point and click environment for features like workflows and object creation along with programming languages Apex, Visualforce for custom coding.

SaaS and a highly configurable PaaS with a decent feature set is a truly innovative way of creating high performing sites. So, what are those key advantages that make Salesforce.com a great solution to go with?

Benefits of building branded sites and web apps on Salesforce

Building a site in the cloud ecosystem provides notable savings. Foremost, cloud adoption eliminates the need for acquiring and maintaining your own servers, databases, and operating systems. Instead of spending large amounts of money on hardware installation, dynamic web pages created on the Force.com platform can be easily deployed and maintained.

1. The versatility of options and opportunities

With Salesforce services, you can build anything from a simple single-page brochure website to a dynamic and complex E-commerce store. Corporate sites containing static pages are the easiest ones to create, even with limited HTML knowledge. Pre-built components and free apps available on AppExchange can help you create web pages within an hour. More interactive websites such as product catalogs that catch and push information to your visitors require custom development and knowledge of Salesforce programming language — Apex code. Alternatively, you can create high-performing sites with any popular framework using Salesforce’s Heroku platform.

Tapping into this cloud environment gives you much more than a convenient development platform with drag-and-drop features, seamless deployment, hassle-free hosting, and maintenance. The platform offers an opportunity to create a state-of-the-art business website and merge it with powerful CRM technology. It makes Salesforce a perfect space for data unification and automated business processes. All the information from your site, including email signups, customer data, leads will be automatically synced with a CRM system.

2. Development without Code

Salesforce is an especially advantageous solution for small businesses as the company provides access to high-powered software, low-code development environments, tools that once upon a time were reserved for big business. It allows you to design stellar web apps as well as custom pages by adopting Force.com capabilities such as analytics, programmable logic, workflow, and approvals that otherwise would be highly expensive to develop.

The platform has a handy tool called Schema Builder so you can see your object database table in action. Both coders and non-technical users can visualize and configure the data model easier with the tool. Automating business processes is not a big deal for non-developers likewise. Updating or creating new records, tasks, or submitting approval requests is easy with the point-and-click Process Builder tool.

The built-in Web-to-Lead feature allows you to build HTML form and paste into your site to have all lead information directly into Salesforce. Social media integration with options to embed feeds, share buttons, and other social widgets to your web pages is seamless and effortless.

Add to these tools the ability to embed analytics capabilities directly into your website for getting insights on your customer data. All this is possible to build without any coding experience. Additionally, you can browse through hundreds of ready-made apps and third-party extensions on the AppExchange marketplace to add extra features painlessly.

Still not enough to cover your requirements? You can design robust, visually appealing pages with Visualforce and develop functionality as per your needs through Apex code or Heroku tool.

3. Custom website development

Salesforce provides several options for designing custom sites.

Force.com

Force.com is the perfect fit for developing web applications and sites that tightly integrates with Salesforce instance. Beyond the aforementioned no-code builders, you are provided with pro-code tools and Apex language for custom solutions. Apex is an object-oriented framework used to create web & email services as well as perform complex validation. With Apex, developers can build transactional logic, insert business logic to Visualforce pages and system events. It’s worth mentioning that Force.com also contains features that simplify and accelerate the custom development process:

It has its own Database, which is configurable with the built-in customization tools, so there is no need for an external database.
Visualforce markup language for creating dynamic UI.
APIs (Application Programming Interface) allowing the interactions between your site and other applications.

Heroku

Heroku is a code-based PaaS solution that makes the process of building and deploying scalable websites & web apps fast, easy, and effortless. For example, in order to keep an app running at scale on the platform, it only takes knowledge of a few commands on the Heroku CLI and Dashboard. Heroku’s infrastructure and a rich library of add-ons significantly reduce time to market and development budget. Since the platform takes care of hardware and servers, developers can focus on perfecting their code.

Heroku is focused more on customer-facing software development, but creating simple web pages is either possible. Furthermore, you can benefit from a free service model for small projects, and for more complex needs, there are tiered service packages. With Heroku, developers are empowered to build websites and portals, responsive web apps & mobile apps in an open-language they prefer. The platform is so easy to use that it’s a top choice for many development projects. If you require a robust backend with minimum investment, Heroku is exactly what you are looking for.

Salesforce DX

Salesforce DX is a modern developer experience that provides you with an end-to-end lifecycle for agile development. It’s a code-heavy environment used primarily by professional programmers to build and manage applications & web pages in a more efficient way. DX combines the functionality of Force.com and Heroku Flow along with new improvements to facilitate automated testing and enable source-driven development.

The lower reliance on code programming to create functionalities enables faster web design and implementation while reducing technical costs. Yet building a high performing site with elegant design requires deep knowledge of utilizing HTML or Javascript in Force.com or any other open-language supported by Heroku.

Creating a code without being familiar with Salesforce technology can result in security threats, usability issues, or low search engine optimization. Hiring a certified development team who is well-versed in the technology and has experience creating cloud-based sites is the best way to mitigate the risks and get a quality-built, well-functioning website. g elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

4. High scalability & security you can count on

Scale up or down as per your needs

Fantastic flexibility and numerous options are other great features of SaaS solutions. The platform automatically scales based on the user licenses acquired. Salesforce offers various subscription plans, but they also offer the option of changing settings and functionalities to more accurately meet your needs. Well-created sites support several millions of users performing billions of transactions. So, it’s the perfect fit for custom web development requiring global deployments or large numbers of users.

Data security best practices

The websites built natively on the Salesforce platform ensure robust security infrastructure for privacy controls, data security, and operational reliability on all levels. All customer financial and personal information is protected within their data centers certified to the highest standards. You are free to choose which pages, data you would like to be public as the vendor’s security model gives you centralized control of access and visibility to data for certain users and groups.

5. Mobile-first experience is a necessity

We live in a mobile world.

In 2020, 51.53% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones. People use smartphones to do anything from simple internet searches to ordering food or buying big-ticket items. Besides, Google gives priority to websites that are mobile-optimized, ranking them better. That’s why responsive design and mobile landing pages are worthwhile investments.

Salesforce gives you a simple and cost-effective approach to create a web application, online store, or a marketing site with dynamic pages that will seamlessly run on all devices. Lightning Design System & Lightning Experience tools help developers to design a User Interface (UI) that adapts to the device characteristics without heavy coding.

Mobile-friendly sites ensure you don’t deliver broken experiences for customers on a desktop or visiting on mobile. Thus, your website will look and function equally well on tablets, laptops, and smartphones, helping you to reach more clients faster.

Wrapping up

The Force.com platform is an effective tool that allows you to exploit key functionalities of the platform by capturing lead data using web-to-lead forms on your site, providing customer support to visitors, and much more. Salesforce has a lot to offer. If you use it properly, it can help you save money, time, as well as human resources. As a qualified development company, we will be glad to help you boost your business productivity by leveraging cloud computing technology capabilities.

The increasing number of companies switch to SaaS due to the versatile pricing policy, rapidly scaling solutions, shorter implementation, and high mobility. As follows from Gartner surveys, the demand for cloud products will only rise in the coming years. Salesforce company is a market leader that will continue to grow as a choice for organizations looking to develop new websites and business applications due to its customer-centric approach. With unique PaaS & SaaS offerings available under one roof, the cloud software provider outperforms traditional programming frameworks in all parameters.

Looking for expert consulting services? You are at the right place. Don’t hesitate to contact us today.adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

The post Why Choose Salesforce for Website Development: Top 5 Reasons appeared first on Technology Grounds .

Top Salesforce Development Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Nik Skliarov — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 07:31:59 +0000

Top Salesforce Development Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Many organizations have been increasingly using the services of Salesforce for a plethora of benefits. The platform provides the ability to build personalized business solutions with tons of capabilities out of the box and allows for virtually endless customization & innovation.

Salesforce’s declarative development opportunities made the software creation process easier on the companies’ IT departments. Through a combination of drag-and-drop user interfaces and form builders, the vendor enables citizen developers to build a working app and start using it in hours.

However, many businesses are looking for customizations beyond the scope of what declarative tools offer in a bid to meet their more specific requirements. At this point, the need for custom code rises. The developers inexperienced in building software in the cloud can face problems.

For those who can learn from mistakes and want to understand the Salesforce environment better, we have compiled the list of the top mistakes made by developers and proven ways to avoid them.

Mistake 1. Using traditional development methodologies

Some programmers apply the waterfall method, the most traditional approach, others prefer rapid application development (RAD), and the thirds choose lean development for their projects. Each one has its own pros & cons and works effectively in different situations.

The point is that classical software development processes don’t work similarly well for cloud-based projects. Salesforce & Force.com are cloud environments that require a different method of building applications. The vendor offers pre-built components that enable creating prototypes, developing software, and performing tests in very rapid cycles. The activities and steps used in traditional approaches are either performed differently or are needless in the cloud platform.

How to avoid: Take time to learn ins & outs of Force.com

Understanding the peculiarities of the PaaS environment and its difference from traditional tools is critical to succeed and harness the power of the platform. While your development methods may still work for your cloud-based project, they may increase the time of building software. Sound knowledge of Force.com is imperative for those looking to maximize ROI and take advantage of the platform’s numerous capabilities.

Mistake 2. Prioritizing custom code over declarative development tools

A faster turnaround time of app creation is one of the innumerable Salesforce benefits. However, this advantage can turn into a challenge for developers who get accustomed to building a solution through custom programming

They will have plenty of opportunities for coding something out to create a robust application, but why waste time and effort when Force.com performs much of the work for you. It’s always the best approach to look into using drag-and-drop functionality and services for business process automation and data modeling that could replace the need for a fully custom solution.

How to avoid: Learn when the declarative tools are the best choice

Before initiating any custom development, invest time in discovering the Force.com configuration options such as formula fields, workflows, etc. There is no reason for creating the functionality via hand programming if you can build it in a few clicks using declarative tools. Knowing the nuances of the platform features and services, and when their usage is more efficient than custom coding will improve productivity, save precious time and money. Furthermore, Salesforce provides a helpful learning experience platform – Trailhead. It combines a library of educational content and a playground for hands-on experience, letting developers learn and put their skills to the test.

Mistake 3. Writing test cases for the sake of covering code

Salesforce indeed requires achieving a minimum of 75% of code coverage with unit test cases. Since this figure refers only to test coverage, developers often disregard the quality of tests pursuing to reach the mandatory threshold.

Salesforce is a multi-tenant environment that hosts thousands of companies’ apps on the same physical platform. Any code that slows down the system affects the user experience for all users as a whole. Therefore, the vendor imposed the code coverage requirement for deploying custom Apex code as one of the indicators of the test effectiveness.

The primary purpose of the test cases is to catch logic flaws, uncover bugs, and ensure your custom code runs correctly. Forcing 75% coverage encourages programmers to double-check their work. Admittedly, you can write useless unit tests, but the more branches of code you cover, the higher probability of finding a regression bug if you change it later. Most developers acknowledge that unit testing is crucial for the maintenance of a code base and Continuous Integration.

It may seem like a chore, yet there are some tools and techniques developers use to simplify the process and secure the efficient code functioning within normal parameters.

How to improve the testing procedure

Defining a clear perspective of the customizable features will help you concentrate on your custom code alone in place of testing built-in Salesforce functionality.
Using test automation tools is a proven way to increase the consistency of code testing while reducing time. Apex Unit is a testing framework aimed to streamline the management of unit tests. This framework allows you to schedule and run tests asynchronously as well as filter and group tests into suites. The tool helps with code coverage requirements by providing metrics and test reports.

Apex unit tests are great, but it wouldn’t be enough to ensure that your code is working end-to-end. You have to employ automated tools to test your application from the perspective of UI, functionality, integration, and regression testing. We suggest using these most widely used tools for web page testing:

Selenium Webdriver – for browser-based UI testing
HP Unified Functional Testing (UFT)
Provar
Cucumber

Mistake 4. Following general design guidelines

Visualforce allows developing a rich UI with complex multimedia or deep interactions. Salesforce developers can’t resist using these abilities to create dynamic custom interfaces. However, first, they forget about the enormous capabilities of the platform aimed to streamline the process. Second, they risk reaching the limits for page sizes and facing performance issues.

Code reuse in Visualforce is essential, especially in large projects, where many developers might try to reinvent the wheel by writing the same markup and logic over and over or copy-pasting the Visualforce code across different pages. This amateur activity leads to a maintenance hell in the long-term for sure. The good news is that this issue is easy to address with the help of the platform’s components.

How to avoid:

1. Check the tools available on Salesforce

There is an online tool Visualforce Generator that makes an autogeneration of the VF page layout as easy as just a button click. Further, you can modify it as per your requirements. You even don’t need to install anything.

2. Don’t overload the page with data

Pages overloaded with functionality and unbounded data is a bad practice that can lead to poor performance or ability. You must design a VF page around the particular task with defined workflows and navigation. Pushing back on requests to add non-essential functionality enables adding features without impacting performance. All-in-all, building prototypes is an excellent way to validate the concerns. With Force.com, prototyping the core concepts of your software will take no more than several days.

3. Reuse custom code

Visualforce is a framework that enables the design of dynamic UIs with the help of custom controllers and components, which you can reuse for creating other pages. There are multiple ways of achieving code reusability within VF pages.

Referencing an existing page. It’s the basic technique of code reuse designed to insert the entire content of a VF page into another.
Creating templates or page layouts. It’s a more sophisticated template-based approach used to follow a general layout pattern across different pages.
Defining custom VF components. This technique is the most flexible because custom components allow you to encapsulate design patterns and reuse them for n-number of times in multiple pages.

The platform offers superb components that make code reuse painless and the design of interfaces faster. It’s especially important when you work on medium or large projects.

Mistake 5. Running into governor limits

Since the development lifecycle is rapid in Force.com, programmers are typically diving into building one custom solution after another.

But that day happens when you get the governor limit error message. Upon research from this error, you find out about the limits, which are established by the Salesforce to assure the practical usage of resources and code effectiveness. There are a lot of constraints that restrict standard code implementation to ensure that no one acquires resources from others. The vendor has to do this because of its multi-tenant architecture, where every organization shares the same resource.

So, when first using the platform, you are most likely to encounter the governor limits such as:

A. SOQL query limit

You may hit this limit by doing too many SOQL queries per transaction or in case you perform a very long query that fetches a lot of data. On top of that, there is the character limitation for SOQL statements that contain many formula fields and restrictions for query runtime. You can exceed these limitations by adding very many currency fields that require SOQL to use a format method, merely doubling the field API name length. Upgrading your subscription will not increase your limits. The only workaround is to understand how to navigate around them.

B. Not bulkifying your code

I am quite sure you have heard the phrase “Bulkify your code” a lot, but what does it mean and why this one is important. Bulkification is termed as the ideal way of writing code. This method refers to a combination of repetitive tasks in Apex so that your code correctly handles multiple records at a time. The fundamental idea behind this practice is to optimize your code to ensure the appropriate work of the features, and high performance of your triggers within platform limits. Not paying attention to this concept may impact performance or sometimes lead to a complete code rewrite.

C. Creating several triggers on one object

Many triggers on a single object will confuse the system. The order of execution can’t be defined when having many triggers for the same object due to the same event. The Salesforce system will be unable to connect the flow of all the triggers and execute them synchronously. If you cannot specify the order that they will run in, then you may have unpredictable outcomes.

How to avoid: Optimize code

Even the most advanced design will need code optimization due to runtime constraints. Following these proven techniques will help you to create high-quality code that doesn’t violate limits:

A. Never do queries in loops

When writing a SOQL query inside a for loop structure, your code runs slowly, and triggers are guaranteed to hit governor limits.

The secure method of writing the trigger is to take the query out of the loop structure. To achieve this, create a set object to collect the necessary data and loop through the collection of triggered records. Then create a map object to store a combination of data and user objects. It adds some complications, but this strategy helps to get around the query limits.

B. Make your code bulky

In all your coding, minimize the number of times you touch the database to read or write records. Every code that runs queries must do it in a bulk way. The same rule refers to utility methods and helpers that an Apex request executes. We would suggest using bulk design patterns for records processing. They help make your triggers less resource consuming and efficient enough to handle bulk records. Bulkification of your Apex code is the key to make sure it runs smoothly.

C. One trigger per object

Develop a single trigger which will invoke various Apex classes to do the actual work. If you found out that you have more than one trigger for the same event, it’s better to combine them. Otherwise, you will not be able to control the order of execution. Hence, your code will be unpredictable.

Here you can find the full list of governor limits every Salesforce developer must always bear in mind.

Wrapping up

We hope this blog post will help you avoid the mistakes many developers find themselves in. Salesforce is a robust, cloud environment that provides a high level of flexibility to develop software while maintaining enterprise-level security & privacy. Declarative tools & built-in features of Force.com enable building SaaS apps faster than ever. Instead of struggling with thousands of lines of code, it would be better to focus on the business entirely. Mapping the platform capabilities to your business needs is pivotal for success in the cloud.

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