Customer Reviews

Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is remarkable for three reasons.

The first reason is that this book exists at all. If you search Amazon, you'll see that there are hardly any books about Salesforce technology. If you then search for Force.com, you'll find only this book. This is because, traditionally, Salesforce and Force.com information has all been available electronically, often coming out faster than a book could be published. This is marvelous for access to information, but has a serious downside in that Developers need to look in many different places to find information about developing a Force.com solution. So, this book is beneficial in that a notably large amount of information is available in one place, and that it is available in a comforting paper-based format.

The second reason is that this book specifically focuses on Force.com, which is a relatively new development platform. The book makes no attempt to explain the traditional CRM side of the Salesforce platform; it jumps straight into Force.com, which is the custom development side of the Salesforce offering.

The third remarkable fact is that this book is written by a truly knowledgeable person on the subject. Jason Oullette is Chief Architect at Appirio, arguably the leading organisation specialising in Salesforce and Force.com technology. Jason has been personally involved in some of the biggest and most publicised rollouts of Force.com solutions. For example, he created the solution that Appirio demonstrated during the Dreamforce 2009 conference keynote presentation.

The book itself contains the complete array of technology involved in creating a Force.com solution: user interface, coding, workflow, database, integration and development tools. Each includes a sample solution for the topic discussed.

CHAPTER 1, Introducing Force.com, provides an overview of the Force.com platform and how it fits within the Salesforce suite of products.

CHAPTER 2, Database Essentials, explains how data is stored and accessed within Force.com, including the creation of custom objects and fields. It includes a comprehensive sample application that uses custom objects, formulas and data.

CHAPTER 3, Database Security, explains the multiple security models available in Force.com that can be quite confusing for new developers.

CHAPTER 4, Additional Database Features, takes a more advanced look at fields, record types (used to create different views of the same data) and a few miscellaneous topics.

CHAPTER 5, Business Logic, gets into the 'meat' of development with the Apex programming language that is native to Force.com. It covers lists, loops, governor limits, SOQL (Force.com's version of SQL), triggers, classes, tests and logs. The chapter is rich in information and could almost fill a book of its own.

CHAPTER 6, Advanced Business Logic, covers the more technical topics of SOSL (searching), DML (lower-level database calls), sharing rules (custom security) and email integration.

CHAPTER 7, User Interfaces, introduces the Visualforce platform that provides totally custom interfaces to Force.com applications. It covers the complex topics of controllers, components, actions, security and testing. Once again, this is a topic worthy of its own book. Fortunately, sample code is provided to give a worked solution of a Visualforce implementation.

CHAPTER 8, Advanced User Interfaces, continues with JavaScript interactions, components, Adobe Flex and Force.com sites (public websites). These are very advanced topics that typically cause the most angst in complex implementations.

CHAPTER 9, Integration, covers inbound and outbound communication including Salesforce-to-Salesforce and REST calls.

CHAPTER 10, Advanced Integration, throws in Web Services and the Metadata API (a means of importing/exporting the Force.com configuration).

CHAPTER 11, Additional Platform Features, covers the more mundane workflow, approvals, reporting, internationalisation and single sign-on.

The strength of this book is also its weakness, which is the fact that it covers the complete range of Force.com topics. This unfortunately means that each topic is only covered briefly, with just short samples of each topic. As an example, Chapter 5 covers Apex but only gives short samples of Inserts, Updates, Triggers and Batches. These are some of the most challenging topics in Apex yet there is unfortunately little space to delve deeply into these topics. Thus, the book has a lot of breadth, but not a lot of depth for each topic.

This book is ideal for someone new to Force.com because it provides a comprehensive overview of all Force.com topics, acting as a roadmap of knowledge and capability. However, developers will still find themselves having to consult the traditional sources of information, mostly found on Salesforce web pages and downloadable PDFs.

Don't get me wrong - this is an excellent book that legitimises Force.com development. It covers more topics than all but the best Force.com developers would know. It is already 400 pages; covering all the topics in depth would require encyclopedia-like volumes. Recognise this book as a means of gaining comprehensive insight into the capabilities of Force.com. It is great as a learning aid, but do not expect it to be a definitive reference. You will still need access to more information, but at least this book tells you what capabilities exist. I have no doubt this book will find its way onto the bookshelves of the majority of Force.com developers. Oh, and it's a darn sight easier to read this paper book on the bus than the traditional PDFs that come from Salesforce!

Before reading this book I was having a hard time understanding how to develop integrations with other databases and systems. This book not only goes through the standard custom object and field creations seen in other force.com book, it goes in depth into Apex coding, Visualforce page development, Integration setups and how to setup the Eclipse/Force.com environment successfully. Jason does an excellent job by going past the administration side of salesforce.com and places a strong focus on the complexities that force.com developers face. Salesforce.com developers have to understand three different sections: the salesforce User Interface, Apex (JAVA and SOQL) development and Visualforce pages. This book outlines all three topics. It is a must buy for any force.com developer or administrator who wants to make the jump to the force.com environment. A+

I have been working as a salesforce.com developer since 2004, before there were things like Apex and VisualForce. I recently had one my clients, Vetrazzo, featured during part of Marc Benioff's keynote at Dreamforce 2009. The Vetrazzo customization is approximately 30,000 lines of Apex code, triggers, VisualForce pages, etc. I just wish that Jason's book had existed 18 months ago when I started my project.

I purchased Jason's book via Kindle so I could read it quickly. I went through the entire book during flights from New Orleans to Dreamforce and back. Some of the material was stuff I already knew and understood, but much of the material opened new ideas and methodologies for me. Even as an experienced force.com coder, I had several "a-ha's" in the course of the reading the book.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone developing in, or planning to develop in, salesforce.com. In both cases, reading all the way through the book will save you hours of frustration. If you just want to pick and choose your topics, the book is well organized, and it has a detailed index.

As an aside, the code samples are a bit hard to read on my Kindle (Are you listening Amazon ?). While you can adjust the displayed text size, the code examples are more like figures, and they do not adjust. Also, the light font is difficult to read. The images are actually better in the new Kindle for PC viewer. And Jason has thoughtfully provided all the code samples on a web site.

One final note, if you think you need this book, buy it immediately, read it quickly, and start coding very soon. The force.com platform is constantly improving and expanding. Often, things you cannot do today - and the book contains a lot of very useful "can't do that" warnings - you will be able to do tomorrow. Everything you learn today will be useful tomorrow, and your coding will only get better.

The book covers a surprisingly large number of topics in under 400 pages and is a great reference for both Salesforce.com administrators and developers. You won't find any secret features or undocumented functionality in this book. What you will find is business, functional and technical information packaged in a coherent and logical fashion. The book starts out with the basics and gradually dives deeper and deeper into advanced topics with detailed code. Alot of detailed code. If you look through the code carefully you'll find a number of neat tricks and tips that I haven't seen elsewhere.

If you are like me, when you are looking for a technical resource to help you make money, you don't want pages and pages of someone spouting theory and documentation. You want a book written by someone down in the trenches that has lived the topic and can reveal some hidden gems. If this is the case then this is the book for you. Jason architected Appirio's PS Enterprise product which is reported to have 30,000-40,000 lines of Apex code. I've seen the source code and it's tight. This guy really knows what he's taking about when it comes to the Force.com platform.

Some of my favorite parts of the book include:

Chapter #3 is a detailed look at security on the Force.com platform. Jason combines database, profile, field-level and record-level security into a cool little chapter that really outlines how different parts of the security framework fit together.

Chapter #5 is, in my opinion, the heart of the book as he outlines the business logic encapsulated in the framework. Not only do you look at the basics of Apex and database integration, be he also takes a dive into some neat concepts of object-oriented Apex.

I saw some really interesting SOQL and SOSL techniques in Chapter #6 along with some cool stuff on Dynamic Apex. I know that our PS Enterprise product really leverages Dynamic Apex so this comes from a good source.

Chapter #8 really caught my attention for building advanced user interfaces. I haven't done alot with third-party libraries in Visualforce and there's some really cool stuff in this chapter.

The last couple of chapters have to do with advanced integration using web services, outbound messaging and rolling your own web services for Force.com. If you need some good code examples in different languages you will find them here.

In all this is a very handy reference for the Force.com platform and would be great on your shelf when you need a quick reference or when you are studying for one of the developer certification exams. It fits in quite nicely with the other reference books on the Force.com platform. In the effort of full disclosure, I must declare that I work at Appirio with Jason but unfortunately I have only met him a couple of times in passing.

The second updated edition of Jason Ouellette's DEVELOPMENT WITH THE FORCE.COM PLATFORM: BUILDING BUSINESS APPLICATIONS IN THE CLOUD is a top pick for developers working with Cloud business applications. It tells how to use Force.com to build enterprise applications, and comes from the author's experience building three of the world's top ten Force.com applications. Chapters discuss the database's unique features, how to build intuitive data interfaces, adding social media applications with Chatter's new tools, and more. A 'must' for any who would work with Force.com applications!

It is one of the few salesforce developer books out there, it is way to short on subject matter and has brief run throughs of topics. If you purchase computer books as frequently as I do you will open and shrug "its one of those" To advanced of a topic to be introductory and not even detail to be useful. The book just glosses over everything and leaves the detail out, with detail most of this can be found online for free. Its a short compilation of introductions to a variety of salesforce programming topics.

This is a great resource in that it covers the most commonly used features of Force.com, with real-world insight, best practices, in only 400 pages.

This is a great introduction to salesforce.com development for somebody with a coding background. What separates this book from the online tutorials and documentation that salesforce.com makes freely available is that the author assumes that you're (at least a somewhat) experienced developer. You'll get the most out of this book if the concepts of database design and object-oriented development are not new to you; the author does a good job of translating terminology that will be familiar to an experienced developer into force.com nomenclature. I do wish he had gone deeper into SOQL, Apex, and especially visual force, though - his treatment of the topics was much better for my purposes than the online documentation, but he still stuck with a fairly high-level overview of all three. The later sections on integration were very well done, but I would have gladly sacrificed those in return for a more thorough description of how Visual Force pages are rendered or what controllers can and can't do.

I really liked this book. You might find this book a little difficult if you have never seen or worked on Force.com, however its great for medium-advanced users. I felt that the book was well written and had great examples from real applications / situations. Definitely a good read !

I do not have a huge expertise when it comes to technical books, but I have gone through a handful at this point and I have to say this was one of the more difficult to follow books. The concepts are great, but the structure of the book makes it difficult to follow along with the example application. The book constantly refers to charts and figures that are several pages back, constantly forcing the user to jump back and forth. There was a few times where they had a screenshot of what the page is supposed to look like, but they mislabeled it and it was confusing.