Salesforce.com and the Adobe Flash Platform Webinar
by Jon Mountjoy on December 15, 2009 at 03:27 AM
Adobe is hosting a webinar that you may be interested in - Salesforce.com and the Adobe Flash Platform Webinar. It's on Thursday, December 17 at 11 AM Pacific.
From their web page: "Join us for a demonstration that will showcase how Adobe and salesforce.com unite the power of the Force.com platform with the richness and ubiquity of the Adobe Flash Platform to enable a new generation of cloud-based rich Internet applications (RIAs)."
If you're new to building apps that harness Force.com and Flash - check out our Adobe Flashbuilder for Force.com as well.
Interesting Links 2009-December-10
by Jon Mountjoy on December 10, 2009 at 05:22 AM
Interesting external blog posts related to Force.com development that caught my eye during this past week or two.
- Rails realities part 29 - Salesforce and rails integration, the easy way - a nice tutorial on ActiveSalesforce and Ruby (Java the Hutt)
- Calling A REST Web Service With Apex - a simple example of making a REST call (Jeff Douglas)
- OS X / Salesforce tools updates - Data Loader and TextMate plugin updated to v17 (Simon Fell)
- How to disable Visualforce inputFields - maybe a little ugly :-), but looks like an interesting approach to setting an input field to disabled (TehNrd)
- Using Javascript to validate an Apex form - client side validation (gokubi)
- flickr + jquery + force.com = awesome^5 [part 1] - interesting Flickr and JQuery mashups! (The Silver Lining)
Do you know what's new in Apex Code?
by Jon Mountjoy on December 9, 2009 at 06:31 AM
Check out the What's new in Apex Code webinar tomorrow if you're interested to learn more about what's new Apex.
In particular, you'll find out about:
- custom settings
- batch Apex: asynchronous batch processing
- the new scheduler (currently in pilot)
The first two items - custom settings and Batch Apex, are particularly important - they provide real benefit which you can you start using right now in your Apex code.
Changes to the Developer Force Community Message Boards
by Dana Le on December 9, 2009 at 02:22 AM
The first change is that starting on Thursday, December 10, some of the boards from the CRM community will be moving over to the Developer Force community boards.
The CRM community will be moving to the Answers community and we have made the decision to transfer the following boards based on the nature of their content to Developer Force:
- Apple, Mac, and OSX
- Desktop Integration
- Formulas and Validation Rules
- Excel Connector
- Administrator Jobs
We hope that this will serve the members of both communities in the best way, and are working hard for a smooth transition. We aim to not disrupt the URLs of the boards.
Another change we will be making at some stage after transitioning over the selected CRM community boards is the reorganization of the boards to more logical groupings, and to better align with industry standards. Our aim is to improve the ability of our community members to find the right place for their topic, improve response, and get the right amount of traffic for each board. This reorganization should happen after we've had a chance to evaluate the impact of moving over the boards listed above.
Please don't hesitate to voice your questions or comments, either in the comments section of this blog post, or email us directly at developerforce at salesforce dot com. Thanks!
Dreamforce '09: Hackathon Coverage
by Dana Le on December 9, 2009 at 02:15 AM
In the Force.com Zone during Dreamforce we hosted an event on Wednesday evening designed to get developers going, network and have a good time... the Second Annual Hackathon.
I got my first inkling on how the event was going to go when I caught sight of crowds lining up outside our stanchions as we set up and briefed the staff. Surely they weren't all here for the hackathon? ...THEY WERE!!
Dave Carroll, aka 'DevAngel' served as our MC for the evening, announcing the contest structure within the Mission:Impossible theme:
- Recruits (beginner) simply had to complete building any RIA service embedded in a Force.com application to be entered in a drawing for 10 iPod touches
- Agents (intermediate level) had the goal of integrating a social media service, such as Twitter or Facebook, with a Force.com application. The winning prize at this level was an Alienware gaming laptop.
- Secret Agents (most difficult) had no boundaries on what they could do, and the criteria for judging was all about creativity and coolness factor. The reward for having the most ultimately cool solution? The ultimately cool MacBook Air.
As soon as we hit Go Time, contestants furiously launched into building their applications. Early on, we ran into our first snag -- the local access point was becoming overloaded and contestants were having a hard time staying on the network. Eventually, enough people moved over to the wired network in the Immersion Lab, easing the load and allowing the competition to continue at breakneck pace.
As we proceeded, Jon Mountjoy made sure to give out baseball caps to our contestants, and hackathon-specific t-shirts as well. A nice buzz developed within the audience, which included a lot of people just hanging out and watching the competition unfold, enjoying a little food and a beer. In all, we estimate more than 300 people spent time at the hackathon, and we had about 30 contestants to start.
Eventually, our two hours were up; several iPods were given away to lucky-draw winners in the beginner pool. Our staff scouts reported back on a selection of finalists at the intermediate and advanced levels, and each finalist came up to the podium, and gave a brief overview and demo of what they built.
Here are the intermediate level finalists:
From left to right we have Duncan Stewart, Jennifer Knight and Joe Krutulis. Joe, together with fellow coder James Eitzmann, won the intermediate level. Joe walked away with a nice and shiny Dell Alienware M15x!
The advanced level finalists produced some awesome work - here they are:
From left to right we have Stephen Brown, Jeff Douglas and Colin Loretz. Colin won the advanced level - grabbing a nice MacBook Air in the process! He built a super cool Basecamp integration. Runner up Stephen built a mashup with the Amazon fulfilment web service, and Jeff with Twilio.
Congratulations to our winners, runners up and of course, to everyone who participated! We are looking forward to next year's exciting competition.
Dreamforce '09: Trivia Contest Wrap up!
by Dana Le on December 8, 2009 at 07:20 AM
During the show, one of the ways we tried to show our appreciation, get a conversation going with the community, and have some fun was through our twitter feeds. Throughout the conference, we had a general twitter conversation going with the #forcedotcom tag, and then we have a trivia contest using the #forcetrivia tag.
During Tuesday night's
tweetup event, it seems most folks were engrossed in networking the
twitter community. As a result, there was very little participation in
the trivia contest. Fortunately for apexsutherland, he was able to
tweet a correct answer to win an iPod Nano.
Wednesday was the first full day, and we had questions rotating every half hour or so. We ended up with a good response rate, and the first correct answer from our winner picking script was stonecobra, who took home a Nintendo DSi! (Can you tell I don't actually know anybody's "real" names?)
Thursday the trivia game was in full swing, and we updated the frequency of the questions to change every 15 minutes, which seemed to get more folks jazzed about participation. In the end, after a full day of tweets, psplunker was our winner, also getting a Nintendo DSi.
The crowds were in full force on Friday, despite it traditionally being a slow day. The twitter wire was crackling with life and we wrapped up our last day that afternoon. Unfortunately our winner, unbrelievable had already skedaddled out of the venue, so we FedExed her the iPod Nano instead of getting to embarrass her in public with our award "ceremony" (if you could call it that, ha!)
In the end, the contest was tons of fun! If you have suggestions for questions for next year's contest, DM them to @forcetrivia. They can run the gamut of Force.com, from admin to deep technology, or just about the community in general. Maybe we'll have a prize drawing meanwhile for trivia contest submissions!
Now that we've wrapped up all the exciting times, we're thinking about the more mundane task on how to keep our community a close, happy family during the rest of the year, and while we continue expanding in numbers... specifically:
- What suggestions do you have for keeping the conversation going all year long?
- How can we build a sense of community,and belonging?
- What kinds of appreciation gestures would you developers like to see happen? Schwag and socials, or something else?
Hit me up with your suggestions in the comments. Thanks for reading!
Force.com Web Services API 开发人员指南
by Kavindra Patel on December 4, 2009 at 03:24 PM
Salesforce 支持使用一个简单、功能强大且安全的应用程序编程接口Force.com Web Services API（以下简称“此API”)， 以编程方式访问组织的信息。要使 用本文档，应该基本熟悉软件开发、Web 服务和Salesforce 用户界面。本指南中介绍的任何功能都只有在组织启用了此API 特性之后才可用。此特性在 完整版、企业版和开发人员版中默认已启用。一些专业版组织可能也启用了此 API。如果无法访问在此指南中看到的特性，请联系salesforce.com。
For the English version of Force.com Web Services API guide, go to the documentation page.
Ladybug, Chick or Daisy? Vote on the Spring '10 logo...
by Jon Mountjoy on December 2, 2009 at 10:08 PM
I know it just feels like yesterday when we went live with Winter '10! Well, Spring '10 planning is already under way, and besides all the new technology, there's also the important aspect of logo.
What's it going to be? Have your say and vote away!
PS. Two thing. First, that "crm" won't be in the final platform version of the logo of course ;-). Two, they call them "ladybirds" where I come from, not "ladybugs", which is so much nicer sounding!
Implementing Single Sign-On with SAML on Force.com (and OpenSSO)
by Jon Mountjoy on December 1, 2009 at 06:00 AM
Single Sign-On is important - it increases security and convenience, provide centralized user access control, and it gives me one less password to remember!
One approach to implementing an SSO solution is to use a federated authentication system such as SAML. There are a couple of moving parts in any SAML implementation:
- You - the user - the subject of the security assertion
- The service provider - in our case your Force.com org and application
- An identity provider - an authority system that provides user information
The Force.com platform supports SAML 2 as an SSO implementation, and Developer Force has just published an article Single Sign-On with SAML on Force.com that shows how to implement an SSO implementation using Force.com as the service provider, and OpenSSO on Glassfish as the identity provider.
Ready To Ride the Google Wave session recording and code posted
by Quinton Wall on November 30, 2009 at 10:22 PM
I have had a lot of people asking me when the session recording for my recent Dreamforce presentation Ready To Ride the Google Wave will be available on the internet. Good news is it now available on youtube, and slides may be downloaded in pdf.
In addition, I have uploaded all the source code from both demonstrations (Sassy the Simple Wave, and Boohyah Mobile.) You will find some simple installation instructions contained within each zip but here is a quick run through of what you will need:
Pre-Requisites:
Download the Force.com for Google App Engine toolkit, and follow the instructions on how to set it up.
Quick Steps:
1. Create a new Google Web Application Project, making sure you uncheck "Use Google Web Toolkit"
2. Set up your build path to be similar to screenshot provided. (note most of the jars required will be part of the Force.com for Google App Engine toolkit). Make sure you use Java 1.6
3. Download the sample code for Sassy the Simple Wave, or Boohyah Mobile. (I suggest you start with Sassy to get familar with the basics first.) Make sure you pay special attention to the settings in the web.xml, app-engine.xml files.
4. Extend, modify, re-use the code to build some wildly creative Google Wave robots which can interact with Salesforce.com in new and imaginative ways.
Follow-up Items:
When you have built something cool, make sure you tell us about it and share!
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