In this chapter, we have reviewed enterprise application integration and extensibility requirements through the eyes of a persona known as Developer X. By using this persona, much like your UI designs, you can ensure that your API tracks real use cases and requirements from representative and ideally actual users of it.
When defining your API strategy, keep in mind the benefits of the standard Salesforce APIs and how to evangelize those and the significant investment Salesforce puts into them in order to provide access to the information stored in your Custom Objects. We have also seen that platform tools such as Lighting App Builder, Lightning Process Builder, and Visualflow can be extended with embedded functionality from your package that can be accessed without the need for code.
When needed, leverage your Service layer to create application APIs either on-and/or off-platform using Apex and REST as delivery mechanisms. Keep in mind that REST requires additional design considerations to ensure that your REST API can be considered properly RESTful and thus familiar to Developer X who has been using other REST APIs. Application callouts configured via Custom Metadata allow developers to extend the logic within your application.
Don't forget that while technologies such as Visualforce, Lightning and Apex provide you great flexibility as a developer and finely tuned functionality to the user, they can often lead to reduced opportunities for extensibility for the subscriber; by using Field Sets and Apex Application Extensions (leveraging Type.forName) you can reddress this balance. Also keep in mind that Field Sets provide a good extensibility tool beyond custom UI use cases. For example, they can be used to expose subscriber custom fields when building Mobile UIs using JavaScript frameworks.
There is no need to upload a new version of the FormulaForce package in this chapter if you have been following along; if not, take the latest code from the sample code provided with this chapter to update your packaging org and upload a new package.
In the next chapter we will review approaches and features that help your application scale.