Enterprise organizations have complex processes and integration requirements that typically span multiple locations around the world. They seek out the best in class applications that support not only their current needs but also those of the future. The ability to adapt an application to their practices, terminology, and integrations with other existing applications or processes is a key to them. They invest as much in your application as they do in you as the vendor capable of delivering an application strategy that will grow with them.
Throughout this book, you will be shown how to architect and support enduring applications for enterprise clients with Salesforce by exploring how to identify architecture needs and design solutions based on industry-standard patterns.
Large-scale applications require careful coding practices to keep the code base scalable. You'll learn advanced coding patterns based on industry-standard enterprise patterns and reconceive them for Force.com, allowing you to get the most out of the platform and build in best practices from the start of your project.
As your development team grows, managing the development cycle with more robust application life cycle tools and using approaches such as Continuous Integration become increasingly important. There are many ways to build solutions on Force.com; this book cuts a logical path through the steps and considerations for building packaged solutions from start to finish, covering all aspects from engineering to getting it into the hands of your customers and beyond, ensuring that they get the best value possible from your Force.com application.
Chapter 1, Building, Publishing, and Supporting Your Application, gets your application out to your prospects and customers using packages, AppExchange, and subscriber's support.
Chapter 2, Leveraging Platform Features, ensures that your application is aligned with the platform features and uses them whenever possible, which is great for productivity when building your application, but—perhaps more importantly—it ensures whether your customers are also able to extend and integrate with your application further.
Chapter 3, Application Storage, teaches you how to model your application's data to make effective use of storage space, which can make a big difference to your customer's ongoing costs and initial decision-making when choosing your application.
Chapter 4, Apex Execution and Separation of Concerns, explains how the platform handles requests and at what point Apex code is invoked. This is important to understand how to design your code for maximum reuse and durability.
Chapter 5, Application Service Layer, focuses on understanding the real heart of your application: how to design it, make it durable, and future proofing around a rapidly evolving platform using Martin Fowler's Service pattern as a template.
Chapter 6, Application Domain Layer, aligns Apex code typically locked away in Apex Triggers into classes more aligned with the functional purpose and behavior of your objects, using object-orientated programming (OOP) to increase reuse and streamline code and leverage Martin Fowler's Domain pattern as a template.
Chapter 7, Application Selector Layer, leverages SOQL to make the most out of the query engine, which can make queries complex. Using Martin Fowler's Mapping pattern as a template, this chapter illustrates a means to encapsulate queries, making them more accessible and reusable and making their results more predictable and robust across your code base.
Chapter 8, User Interface, covers the concerns of an enterprise application user interface with respect to translation, localization, and customization, as well as the pros and cons of the various UI options available in the platform.
Chapter 9, Lightning, explains the architecture of this modern framework for delivering rich client-device agnostic user experiences, from a basic application through to using component methodology to extend Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile.
Chapter 10, Providing Integration and Extensibility, explains how enterprise-scale applications require you to carefully consider integration with existing applications and business needs while looking into the future by designing the application with extensibility in mind.
Chapter 11, Asynchronous Processing and Big Data Volumes, shows that designing an application that processes massive volumes of data either interactively or asynchronously requires consideration in understanding your customer's volume requirements and leverages the latest platform tools and features, such as understanding the query optimizer and when to create indexes.
Chapter 12, Unit Testing, explores the differences and benefits of unit testing versus system testing. This aims to help you understand how to apply dependency injection and mocking techniques to write unit tests that cover more code scenarios and run faster. You will also look at leveraging practical examples of using the Apex Stub API and the ApexMocks open source library.
Chapter 13, Source Control and Continuous Integration, shows that maintaining a consistent code base across applications of scale requires careful consideration of Source Control and a planned approach to integration as the application is developed and implemented.