Even though Salesforce affords freedom from coding to allow swifter development, there are certain concerns that just refuse to go away. With businesses becoming more complex and bigger, no or low code development solutions tend to fall by the wayside and more complex solutions start being adopted to cater to all the custom requirements.
The development of appropriate tools across most languages, platforms, and stacks make the process of issuing releases regularly more feasible. These tools not only make the lives of the developers considerably easier but also dramatically improve their productivity and enhance their ability to deliver solutions more quickly making them extremely desirable by both developers and the management. Salesforce with its launch of Salesforce DX caters specifically to this requirement.
What Does Salesforce DX Bring To the Table?
Essentially, Salesforce DX is a fresh commitment to providing the tools as well as the support to traditional development teams for easy and hassle-free application development. Some highlights:
A fresh philosophy: Conventionally, the org was represented only by itself and development teams with experience of other platforms or those who have more stringent practices and rigorous requirements use other tools along with the command line to exercise version control of metadata.In the process,they introduce another representation of the configuration of the org. Even though it is a recommended practice, it is made tougher by the restrictions of the metadata API and shortage of first-party tools. Salesforce has made it very clear that using source control is necessary for working and collaborating. Version control brings with it a number of benefits for developers as far as collaborating, auditing, and disaster recovery is concerned. It is also an essential part of an agile development process that aims to deliver features to users quickly and without risk using an application delivery platform like flosum.com.
New and improved tools: A new version of the CLI incorporates the existing features found in the Heroku add-on for Force.com CLI and the migration tools in Force.com with some additional features. While nothing is radically new, the functionality is now all in one place and it’s likely that the capabilities will be extended soon. The new feature with the most impact is Scratch orgs that enables version control workflow. The improved functionality means developers can progress from version control to an operational org very quickly indeed making redundant the need for maintaining and synching orgs mapping to their representation of version control for development.
Force.com IDE
Developers get a totally revamped IDE built over the CLI that gives more direct exposure of key functionality in the form of a command palette. Clicking on the IDE gives all the details you want while permitting easy incorporation of changes to the CLI by users.
Conclusion
While Salesforce DX allows developers more flexibility, it definitely is not a product that will allow you to overcome the current limitations and dependencies. However, the biggest advantage is that it allows developers familiar with more conventional coding practices to use source control in the same way they were accustomed to.
