
Salesforce DX is live and being used by many developers and development teams lately. This latest development suite from Salesforce can help improve the development experience by offering a smoother and integrated lifecycle to ensure agile, high-performance development. As of late, with the availability of DX, Salesforce is one of the top-rated development platforms chosen by many frontline enterprises to quickly and easily build and release business applications.
These rapid app development capabilities of the force.com platform will let both the expert application developers, as well as the common citizen developers, make applications for their specific business needs. Salesforce DX is a cleanly built, cloud-based, code environment that will let a broader group of people build applications, test, modify those and help organizations to function in an agile manner to keep up with the changing technological requirements and market needs.
Salesforce improving the developer experience
One doubt people had in mind during the time of Salesforce DX announcement was that why Salesforce is keen on enhancing the developer experience. However, the answer to this question is quite simple: revenue!
The war in of cloud-based development market is on for a while now. You can see Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all are investing billions into building their sophisticated cloud platforms to grab the major market share. Azure from Microsoft may generate about $2.6 billion in revenue and expected to have a double-digit growth rate year-on-year. AWS (Amazon Web Services) also has a $20 billion, which may touch $50 billion in the coming couple of years. The investment of Google is nearly $50 billion already to surpass Amazon.
All the cloud vendors are now launching their platforms to let the users to custom build or customized business apps. Back in 2016, Box had opened its unique platform to developers for the custom building of business applications by using and modifying the given content. They began focusing on pre-packaged apps for HR, manufacturing, finance, etc. There are many cloud computing vendors who followed suit and started offering a host of platforms for the developers to build custom apps.
The last year’s annual Report of Salesforce had shows that the revenue from Sales Cloud, App Cloud, and Service Cloud surpassed was $3 billion. Combined, the Salesforce business is about 17% of the overall revenue of the organization. This is generated from more than about 2000 applications on AppExchange.
Force.com migration toolkit and integration process
Many of the key principles of Salesforce DX is well aligned with the Flosum platform; it offers a source-driven development approach as a part of their comprehensive solution. As the development team size grows, and the velocity of application development increases, version control becomes imperative in order to make sure that the developers aren’t overwriting the codes.
A primary common version control system working across the teams may ensure better collaboration and increase visibility for the team members, and help keep the Salesforce sandboxes in sync. This will ultimately drive to a significant increase in productivity and reduce the scope of quality flaws.
The basic nature of the Salesforce platform will also enable the developers, developers, and admins to quickly and easily build applications and release them without delay. The Flosum development approach will support agile as well as waterfall methodologies, where the users can follow the industry best practices to reduce development and testing time. Flosum will also offer some out of the box testing facilities and force.com migration toolkit too to make sure that the application code gets tested with Selenium automation tests and make sure that the developers also perform regression and smoke tests.
Flosum also offers a standard developer experience by supporting integration with different open-source solutions as a Git version control system as well as continuous integration with Jenkins etc. The add-on supported solutions also include tools like Eclipse, Atom, MavensMate, etc. Salesforce always uses its own technology in order to provide solutions to the customers. Say, for example, as part of their DX program, Salesforce now leverages their own metadata and tooling APIs, which are used by Flosum as well as other leading partners in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Understanding Salesforce DX better
You also should know that Salesforce DX isn’t just another product from Salesforce. This is a complete program having various initiatives that cover continuous integration, release management, and also the packaging of a bundle of Salesforce applications. You cannot consider Salesforce DX as a monolithic platform which offers a set of tools. The users can also choose and leverage different standalone parts of Salesforce solutions while leaving the other parts which aren’t applicable to them. Salesforce DX can also be used with many other tools and solutions which are available at the market and already in use with many.
Salesforce DX is primarily an initiative from the provider in order to enhance the developer efficiency by offering the same tools as other third-party technology solutions providers. Say, for example, you can compare the Microsoft Visual Studio tools and Team Foundation Server offering a complete set of holistic business solutions.
In order to further monetize and develop the Salesforce platform, the providers need to offer more comprehensive solutions for the traditional development process too to build code-intensive apps. Salesforce DX primarily uses open source technology in order to make the transition easier for the developers who are on the other technology platforms. On DX, you can build around a solid CLI (command line interface) as well as open APIs, which also offers the most needed flexibility for developers to integrate it into many different outside tools too.
With DX, Salesforce is now able to take their technology into the next level by incorporating developer’s needs too into their business solutions. Salesforce had also promised to change the way how the tooling APIs and metadata work. It will also help partners like Flosum, who further build better solutions based on these tools and APIs to offer better service to the users. As the foundation gets stronger, the entire solutions offered will also automatically improve to offer an enhanced experience as well as to improve the usability.