Salesforce Summer 08 – it just keeps getting better

Salesforce has announced new features that will be available in the Summer 08 release. You can view them here.
One of the best features is Visualforce. Now developers can truly customize the user experience within Salesforce.
This does away with the intricate (and error prone) coding involved with s-controls.

If you have a developer account, please go to the Tabbed Accounts example to see the ease and power of Visualforce.
It allows you to break up the long Account detail page into multiple tabs with about 15 lines of code.

The combination of APEX on the backend and Visualforce as the user interface is going to allow developers the full freedom of application creation using the Force.com platform.

I will be posting more about this with more examples in the future.

Create a Salesforce Case from outside Salesforce – Web to Case

Would you like to be able to let your customers create cases using pages familiar to them or within another application?

Using the Web to Case feature in Salesforce, this is not only possible but also very easy.

Now is a great time to be a developer!

The state (past to present) of development – or now is a great time to be a developer

At start there was the mainframe with central deployment and support but with COBOL and CICS

Then we had the client-server model that used the powerful pc as the client which allowed better user experience and development tools but had the difficult deployment and support model.

The internet ushered a return to the simpler central deployment and support model. No more installations on separate client machines.

But the development and user experience also returned to page-based environment.

With the new slew of RIA environments (Flex, AIR, Ajax), and the corresponding frameworks, we are now returning to rich user experience with the development tools to match, while still keeping the central deployment/support model.

Welcome to Oracle and Salesforce development

First thank you for taking the time to visit this site and read the articles.

Let me introduce myself…..

I am Peter Martin, originally from Ireland and now living in Michigan, US. I have been involved with application development since 1993 in various industries and on different platforms (JCL, Cobol all the way through to Internet development).

My interests and expertise now lie with Oracle Application Express and Salesforce.

I hope that this can serve as center for tips and tricks with these platforms. But also more importantly I hope to clear away some of the more confusing aspects for beginning developers as well as non-developers.

I will also be writing about other technical topics (Adobe Flex, SEO).