Salesforce has now become a trusted name in the enterprise circle and now in the transformation from being just a friendly CRM product to a full-spectrum enterprise platform. It features countless developer activities, huge amounts of data, e-commerce, and you may count on it to create any enterprise applications.
Salesforce lately announced many mighty tools which will make this platform not only more attractive to the enterprise developers, but also more functional. The major advancement in this direction is the introduction of Salesforce DX, which is a powerful Command Line Interface which will effectively fill the gaps in the conventional methods of enterprise application development and the latest Salesforce toolset.
This set forth a great opportunity for the Salesforce administrators and developers alike to make great enterprise applications which can leverage its new capabilities without deviating from the legacy development practices. Further, we will discuss a few areas where DX helped the developers to ease up Salesforce transition.
Issues related to Metadata
On looking at a few major problems which Salesforce developers may encounter, we can see that the No.1 among these is metadata of all codes and customizations which makes a Salesforce account unique. When you build a new application, it gets initiated as metadata. If you further try to dump metadata into the Salesforce account, one may see it getting organized to more than a hundred silos. Each metadata type, i.e., page layouts or custom objects get delivered in folders.
However, this is not what an enterprise developer wants to see. You may find all the Apex Classes used in an org getting stored into a specific folder and the Custom Objects into another folder. You may see the names as in Flosum.com, but there will not be any proper structure to Org. Developers may see varying metadata types which are organized into folders by project or application. Apart from all these, the enterprise developers may also expect an agile release cycle, version control, reports of code difference, as well as online repositories, etc. for the projects.
Salesforce DX Packages
As of late, Salesforce developers tend to group the related functionalities with unmanaged or managed packages. Among these, unmanaged packages may not be really what the enterprise system developers want to explore. In fact, this is a way to move or share the metadata assets. When you are trying to load the unmanaged packages into org, the assets in the packages tend to flow into the ocean of unpackaged assets where it is possible to edit these freely. However, the unmanaged packages cannot be upgraded and also cannot be used on AppExchange.
Like above, Salesforce DX comes with a lot of customized options and packages, which makes the integration of existing enterprise applications with the DX easier and cost effective. Salesforce DX also finds to have continuous upgrades, which helps to eradicate the deficiencies of the previous versions from time to time. Altogether, for enterprise users, it seems to be an ideal time to upgrade to this true enterprise platform to leverage its flexibility and scalability for their best benefits.
Autho Bio: Evans Walsh is a freelance content writer. He has written many good and informative articles on different categories such as technology, health, fashion, beauty, education, career, travel etc. He is very responsible towards his job. He loves to share his knowledge and experience with his friends and colleagues.