How will you build this application?

This book is aimed at you, the developer. As a developer, you are already familiar with most standard development tasks, such as defining data objects and modifying user interfaces. However, you may not be familiar with how to accomplish these tasks on the Force Platform, so this book covers all aspects of development and deployment on the platform.

The recruiting application was chosen as the vehicle for your learning experience because it offers use cases that exercise all the capabilities offered on the Force Platform. But to create these use cases, you would have to perform many tasks to simply create the environment to address these use cases. For instance, the application uses seven data objects, as shown in the figure above. You will not have to define seven data objects to learn how to define a data object—you will probably figure it out after one or two. So how can this sample application serve the twin masters of providing a somewhat realistic application while not requiring you to perform repetitive tasks that do not add to your knowledge of how to use the Force Platform?

Fortunately, the metadata foundation of Force Platform applications provide a way to address these conflicting requirements. Throughout the course of this book, you will only perform a development task as many times as you need to learn the task. Additional components will be created by loading metadata and, where appropriate, data itself into your Force Platform organization.

There is a Code Share project associated with this book, which you can locate by going to the Code Share home page, http://developer.force.com/codeshare, and searching for the name of this book. This project contains instructions on how to load the metatdata and data into your organization, when necessary.

Typically, you will be requested to perform a load at the start of a chapter. This process will add the components that are be required for the exercises in the chapter that have not been defined by the previous exercises in the book.

This book takes advantage of metadata in another way. There are two problems that are always associated with any publication that includes hands-on exercises, such as this book. The first problem stems from the relentless curiosity of developers. This book may proscribe a fixed set of steps within a particular chapter, but many developers will go beyond these steps to explore additional capabilities. Sometimes, these explorations change the environment in a way that causes problems for subsequent exercises.

Another problem stems from the focused nature of developers. Although the authors of this book believe that you should read it from beginning to end, you may make the decision to start in the middle, since you are only interested in one particular area, or you feel that you already know the subject matter covered in skipped chapters. Since the application is created in an iterative fashion, you would not normally be able to take this approach and still do the hands-on exercises.

But you can take that approach with this book. The Code Share project also includes metadata and data scripts that create the exact organization you need to perform the tasks of any one chapter. So if you decide you want to start your learning experience with Chapter 9: Visualforce Pages, you can simply take the required steps to bring your organization to the point where you can begin the exercises in that chapter.

This nice capability comes with a caution. The process of bringing your organization to the point required at the start of a chapter is a potentially destructive process. If the process must create an object called Position__c, the process will have to remove any existing object that happens to have the same name.

The Code Share project includes a process that will check to see if running these scripts could have an impact on any existing components in your organization, so you should never have to suffer an unexpected loss of information in your development organization. But if you have any doubts about the effect of these metadata and data loads might have on your environment, please see the instructions in the Code Share project for details on how to avoid this situation.

Voice of the Developer

Throughout this book, you will see sections like this titled “Voice of the Developer”. The main purpose of this book is to guide you to a comprehensive understanding of the Force Platform through a series of hands-on exercises. But, of course, there are plenty of considerations that you will understand after having worked with the platform for a while. Andrew Fawcett, chief architect of CODA, one of the largest Force Platform ISVs, has been through this learning curve, and he offers his council in these notes, so you can benefit from the experience of an enterprise developer who came to this platform a fairly short time ago.