Working on the Salesforce platform is tough work for developers in comparison to other platforms of software development because of the complexities that they have to encounter. Well, this is now a thing of the past because going by the announcement made by Salesforce at their massive Dreamforce conference in 2016, Salesforce DX is on its way. Remarkably, the statement grabbed all attention over other new things that Salesforce plans to bring to the table, and this raises high hopes about the new product changing the lives of developers by making it much easier to work on the Salesforce platform. There is a high expectation among developers that once the new product is available to them, it will change the way they develop software, test it and deploy it for clients.
The broader goal
The goal behind launching the new product is to chart a new path in developing and deploying as well as upgrading Salesforce apps across the entire lifecycle by integrating the best of Heroku and Force.com developer experiences. Its purpose is to facilitate source driven code development, seamless promotion of code throughout development to the stage of production, team collaboration with governance, provide support for third-party developer tools and continuous integration with automated testing. The new product will give developers a shot in the arm as it would enhance their ability for custom development carried out on the Salesforce platform.
For developers only
The new product or application is for developers only as it is not a customer facing application, and administrators or users cannot take any advantage of it. However, it has enormous potential to turn developers highly productive and make their lives easy. The product aims at bringing application development on the Salesforce platform more in line with the methods followed in .NET and Java by incorporating features and tools like improved Metadata API, Scratch.Org, CLI, Forec.com IDE2, CI solution, and version control system as the source of truth.
Command Line Interface (CLI)
The command line interface (CLI) of the new product is one of the most exciting additions for any Salesforce developer. The new CLI is worked upon the Heroku CLI. Developers can make use of it to avail the advantages of all Salesforce APIs, and this new edition does away with the utilization of many different tools. The CLI is the only avenue for developers to interact with the Salesfore.org. You can use it to push and pull metadata and source data into the org, and even carry out operations that influence the metadata in the Org. It becomes easy to use DevOps with Salesforce by using the CLI.
The new feature Scratch.orgs
The new feature Scratch.orgs creates a new Salesforce environment. It facilitates disposable and source driven deployment of metadata and Salesforce data. Since you can fully configure Scratch.orgs, you can emulate different editions of Salesforce with different preferences and features that enhance collaboration during the process of development and boosts productivity.
The new product will allow teams more flexibility to enable them to define the methodology that suits them best.
Lucy Jones is a seasoned app developer who has extensive experience in using the Salesforce platform. She had spent a brief stint with Flosum.com before switching jobs. She is a guest writer on various blog platforms and even runs a blog of his own.
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