Chapter 8. The Force Platform IDE

In the previous chapters, you covered a good amount of ground in Force.com development, from creating an application and its associated data objects, through using workflow and analytics. You explored these capabilities with the Force.com Setup menu, which let you make these and many other customizations to your Force.com organization easily. When using the Setup menu directly in your production Force.com organization, you have a very dynamic environment capable of simple declarative changes that are immediately available to your users. And, in many cases, that process works very well.

But there are a number of reasons why you would want to use a more traditional IDE for your development efforts, as follows:

• Your development methodology is not appropriate for this approach, whether for scale of the change, scale of the development team, or the mission-critical nature of the applications in your organization.

• Some of your developers are focusing on the procedural portions of the Force Platform, such as Apex code, and are looking for a development environment designed for that area of endeavor.

• If you are part of a team, it is often easier for each team member to only interact with isolated portions of the overall development effort. The Setup menu shows you everything in your Force.com organization, while your IDE environment allows you to tailor the components of the application that are included in your project.

• Some developers or teams like to keep track of when changes are made to their application, which is usually done with a version control system such as CVS, SCCS, or Subversion.

• Your development effort may involve repetitive tasks. In cases like these, the wizard-driven approach can be more time-consuming than an alternative development environment.

• You may be familiar with a standard integrated development environment, such as Eclipse, and you want to use those skills in the Force.com environment.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use the development capabilities of the Force Platform that are delivered by the Force.com IDE and Metadata API.

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.