Posts
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On the Trail to TrailheaDX
Look at you, all full of pep, spunk, and other synonyms. You are a week away from going to TrailheaDX, the Salesforce conference dedicated to developers. Are you all ready? Do you know what ready is? I sure didn’t, so I decided to do some research and share the fruits of my labor. Let’s run through what to do to make the most out of your trip.
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How to Involve Yourself with Salesforce (Outside of Salesforce)
If you want to get involved in the Salesforce community, the default answer is usually the forums. It isn’t a bad answer, but it isn’t a complete one either. I can tell by the way that you are reading a third sentence into this blog post that you are a person who wants more. Reading this fourth sentence tells me you’re ready for more. You see, there is a wealth of opportunities to interact and get involved in ways that help yourself and others around you. Ways that can cater to your skills or help you develop new ones.
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Finding What's Hot and What's Not with geolocation
Let’s see, clear some cobwebs, dust off some settings, check that it was indeed over a year since my last post. Yep, every thing seems in order. To kick off this post-a-versary, how about a quick exploration of Salesforce’s built in geolocation features, now that this data has been automatically added to the standard address fields!
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Using Gulp to Manage All Your Static Assets
The web development community continues its march towards more advanced methods and processes. CSS preprocessing, JavaScript testing and linting, image compression, and much more make up the web development landscape. Where does that leave you, humble Salesforce developer? Your JavaScript, css and images all get loaded into static resources and that’s it. Surely there is no way to integrate the Salesforce way with all these cool, new tools, right? Prepare to be mildly interested.
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Technical User Standards Design Experience Interface Documentation
If I had ever thought I would be doing a post on documentation, I would have made sure to have more topic starters in the back log. Let me put this out in the open, I hate writing documentation. Now that that is out of the way I feel empowered and what better way to express that than by judging all of you. I am going to guess that a great many of you hate documentation as well. Now don’t get put off by that statement or think I am belittling anyone in particular. I have seen it everywhere, on projects big and small, proprietary and open source, useful and utter garbage. Even my own git hub projects languish with bad documentation. Actually writing documentation, it seems, is farther down on my todo list than writing a blog post about writing documentation. Part of the problem is that once you start getting serious about documenting it appears that everyone has different ideas of the style, scope, and purpose. With every single sample different, finding a consistent thread of what a specific type of documentation is for, becomes an infuriating mess. If you are like me, this turns into mental gridlock as you agonize over how far you go with the details.
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MavensMate Vs Force.com IDE
Are you looking for a no holds bared, pulse pounding, head-to-head match up between two established titans!? Then I am sorry, this is just a comparison between two code editors. I am sorry to have wasted your time. If, however, you came here looking for the type of fuel that can keep a flame war burning for way longer than it should have, then have I got a post for you. First let me frame this for anyone who isn’t in the know.
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Here comes NimbusMock!
Oh look, a git hub repo. That’s right, my mocking framework for apex has a name and a repo. Yay? Right now it is a 0.0.1 release. That means there is lots of chance for the api to change (I am still trying to decide whether to split out the object mocking and method stubbing). For now let’s see what it has to offer.
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I am keeping good on my word
Like the title says, I am keeping good on my word to get some stuff done. I have been working on my mocking framework to post it to github. There have been a number of changes. Probably the biggest noticeable change is the switch to a mockito-like when+doReturn style. Along with this, I no longer use a static mock manager which means that there are less chances of method name conflict. The down side to this is that the mock now needs to be injected via constructor or property as the mocked calls are specific to the instance created in the test. The mocks have also been softened and now allow for out of order method invocation. There are still matchers but they have changed a bit. It is very much a work around for the lack of reflection and I expect them to change in the second release. In fact, there is a laundry list of features I want to add, but I need to get something out there first before I start planning where I will put the kitchen sink. Now, some may be wondering why I have not put anything in github and the reason is, is that this was a major overhaul from top to bottom. I didn’t want some broken piece of code attached to my name. Right now it is 90ish percent done. The code is working, but I want more tests and some clean up. You see, I do most of this at night… or the morning as it just so happens (12:11am as of this sentence) and while I produce working code, I also produce code with a high WTF/m at this time. So once I have it cleaned up, tested and commented, I will push it to github and make a big ol’ post about it here.
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I'm not dead
I feel happy. I feel happy…
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Enhanced Mock Mocks
Well color me surprised, my last article on mocking in apex was, well, a little more popular than I thought it would be. I was happy that so may people enjoyed it, but it got me thinking, “Bob, you handsome and brilliant, yet refreshingly humble man, you can do more for your fans!” After an obligatory back patting, I set off to add more features. This will build entirely off of the last article. In fact, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t read it post haste.
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Mock Mocks in Apex
I love mocking frameworks. I love the ability to isolate a unit of code so I can make smaller, more coherent tests. I have grown accustom to them during my time with java and I would love to use them with apex. The problem is that mocking frameworks rely heavily on robust reflection, a feature apex sorrily lacks.
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Looping Slideshow Display With Visualforce and Apex Charting
Anyone ever seen pictures of west-cost start-ups with those TV screens front and center showing some sort of stat or metric? If it is a dev house maybe it is the builds, bugs, & deadlines. A sales firm may have revenue, opportunities and a highlight of recently closed deals. Either way, they are meant to highlight data and allow it to be consumed in a very passive manner, reading it as you pass by. Salesforce makes reports a breeze and dashboards are a snap too. However, what if you wanted to recreate that seamless look, without the tabs, browser UI, or any indication of what is driving the display at all? Sure, there are tons of articles that show you how to get PowerPoint to do that, but using stale data is for suckers. Let’s take a look at what some Apex, Visualforce and JavaScript could do for you.
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Apex Analyzer Dev Diary
Well, this is an interesting situation. When I started this blog, my intent was to do reviews, news, and the occasional small project. My post series on using Heroku to host a personal site was just that. My last post which laid the ground work for an Apex static code analyzer took a good deal of time but would have been fine if it ended there. It didn’t end there though. In fact, I poured a pile more work into it this week to hook together the express framework as well as an sqlite database. If you have been watching the git repo, you have likely noticed…. nothing at all. The changes are so drastic, I cannot commit until I have at least the functionality I had before. No real post this week but I wanted to keep people in the loop.
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Static Code Analysis of Apex
Would you wander down memory lane with me? It was on one of my first projects at Trifecta that I was introduced to Sonar (now SonarQube), a dashboard that aggregated results from a pile of code analysis tools and presented them in a visually appealing way. I loved the kind of insight it provided.When it listed a bunch of unused methods I went to work pruning them. When it found string concatenation in a big, heavily used loop, I replaced it with StringBuilder. When I moved over to Salesforce, I found a number of solutions but most were either costly or incomplete.
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A Quick Update
Sorry for the lack of post this week. House hunting and the depth of the next post are taking a bit more of my time than I expected. If everything goes as planned, I should have a dozy of a post for next week. While I have your attention, don’t be too surprised if the look and feel of the site changes as well, I am experimenting with new styles. I want to keep things simple but pleasing. See you all then!
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From Zero to Heroku in Three Posts, Part 3
Well, we have come a long way, from learning what Heroku was, to hosting a site on it. Now all that is left, are a few minor details. Let’s start by changing that wacky URL to something a bit more appealing.
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From Zero to Heroku in Three Posts, Part 2
So you have made it through From Zero to Heroku in Three Posts, Part 1 and you are still here! If you haven’t, it was a 1000ft view of Heroku, the platform we will be working on in this post series. If you already know Heroku, you should be good anyway. Let’s get started with making a personal page. Please note, this tutorial assumes you know how to make a website with HTML, CSS, and Javascript; otherwise this series of posts would become way too broad.
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From Zero to Heroku in Three Posts, Part 1
With Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, LinkedIn, Instagram, GitHub, StackExchange, MySpace (is MySpace still a thing?) there is a lot of places to put your personal brand. You, dear reader, probably have a few of these yourself. Have you ever wanted a central location you could direct people to, one that linked to all your various identities? Luckily there are solutions, free ones in fact. The one I will be talking about in this series is Heroku, a web host with a unique way to do things.
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