Chapter 15. Deployment

In a traditional software development practice, applications are always developed offline. You write source code, assemble, compile, or link that code, and then deploy and run the executable in a test system to see if it does what you want. Then you come back to the code to make any changes, test again, and, in this way, iterate towards a working solution to your requirement.

The Force Platform differs somewhat from this traditional model, in that when you make changes to our application or organization, those changes are immediately available—‘deployment’ is automatic, at least so far as the environment within which you are working is concerned.

For many application and organization changes, for many businesses, that is enough. Either the application modifications aren’t risky, or the application is not mission critical, so making changes directly within a production organization is the right practice.

For more complex changes, or companies whose business is more dependent on verifiably correct operation of their IT systems, making application changes directly within production isn’t an option. Instead they require application development to follow more formal procedures where changes are implemented and tested in isolation from production code and data.

This chapter covers the options available to you to deploy your Force Platform applications and components from a development environment to a production environment.

Important

If you have been following the examples in the previous chapter, your Force Platform organization should be ready for the exercises in this chapter. If you have not done the exercises, or want to start with a fresh version of the sample Recruiting application, please refer to the instructions in the Code Share project for this book. You can find information on how to access that project in Chapter 1: Welcome to the Force Platform.