Fascinatingly fast turnover in Salesforce
While in the previous article we were talking about a very interesting and fun challenge - however one looks at it, it is a challenge that is mostly introduced by cloud application development itself, as opposed to the good old desktop/enterprise/web/mobile development, which is what we are most of the time doing, when we are using the .NET platform. In this post, I'd like to focus on an undoubtedly pleasant benefit of Salesforce development itself.
Fascinatingly fast turnover
One of the greatest benefits, and best motivating factors in Salesforce development, is the amount of effort that is required to see your results "go live" on the end-user interface & processes.
Let's imagine this trivial situation - you've just added some back-end business logic, and you would like to test it "in-the-wild", or you just want to see what it looks like:
In the .NET world, you would have to build a UI for this, and it would not matter if it is WPF, WinForms, or Web-based application - it just takes time to do this. This is why we often have a similar picture, as shown below, in the "Projects" folder:
Usually, the easiest thing to do for this case, is to create a simple Console, or any other application without a design, but still having some ability to somehow visualize the results of the logic we've just built.
However, in the Salesforce world, everything related to the "standard" visualization of changes is handled by the platform itself. You just write your logic, call it from the UI, or from the Anonymous Apex, and look for the results in a clear UI - no time being wasted to build a UI, which would just be thrown out anyway in a hour or a day.
After working with backend parts of the .NET applications for so long, being able to quickly see the results of your work feels like a gulp of fresh air - isn't this good motivation?
Want some examples? Sure, you'll get them below!
For example, you've just written some business logic in Apex, like that shown above - it just creates new accounts, searches for contacts with an email at some domain, and links them together. Usually in .NET, you'd go directly to the database to see the changes, or output some info to the log file. Eventually, you would find a way to execute this small piece of logic without executing anything else - it will either be a console application, or it could be a unit test.
In Salesforce it's much easier - you just paste your code as Anonymous Apex, execute it, open the new account in the Salesforce UI, and you'll see a nice picture with everything you need. With No lines of code needed for this!
The article was prepared by the Head of Product at The Welkin Suite – Vladimir Gubanovich.
