Preface

Enterprise organizations have complex processes and integration requirements that typically span multiple locations around the world. They seek out the best-in-class applications that support not only their current needs, but also those of the future.
The ability to adapt an application to their practices, terminology, and integrations with other existing applications or processes is key for them. They invest as much in your application as they do in you, as the vendor capable of delivering an application strategy that will grow with them.

Throughout this book, you will be shown how to architect and support enduring applications for enterprise clients with Salesforce by exploring how to identify architecture needs and design solutions based on industry-standard patterns.

Large-scale applications require careful coding practices to keep the code base scalable. You'll learn advanced coding patterns based on industry-standard enterprise patterns and reconceive them for Lightning Platform, allowing you to get the most out of the platform and incorporate best practices from the start of your project.

As your development team grows, managing the development cycle with more robust application life cycle tools, and using approaches such as Continuous Integration, become increasingly important. There are many ways to build solutions on the Lightning Platform; this book cuts a logical path through the steps and considerations for building packaged solutions from start to finish, covering all aspects from engineering to getting it into the hands of your customers and beyond, ensuring that they get the best value possible from your Lightning Platform application.

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at Lightning Platform developers who are looking to push past Lightning Platform basics and learn how to truly discover its potential. You will find this book handy if you are looking to expand your knowledge of developing packaged ISV software and complex, scalable applications for use in enterprise businesses with the Salesforce platform. This book will enable you to know your way around Lightning Platform's non-programmatic functionality as well as Apex, and aid you in learning how to architect powerful solutions for enterprise-scale demands. If you have a background in developing inside other enterprise software ecosystems, you will find this book an invaluable resource for adopting the Lightning Platform.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building and Publishing Your Application, gets your application out to your prospects and customers using packages, AppExchange, and subscriber's support.

Chapter 2, Leveraging Platform Features, ensures that your application is aligned with the platform features and uses them whenever possible, which is great for productivity when building your application, but—perhaps more importantly—it ensures that your customers are also able to extend and integrate with your application further.

Chapter 3, Application Storage, teaches you how to model your application's data to make effective use of storage space, which can make a big difference to your customer's ongoing costs and initial decision making when choosing your application.

Chapter 4, Apex Execution and Separation of Concerns, explains how the platform handles requests and at what point Apex code is invoked. It is important to understand how to design your code for maximum reuse and durability.

Chapter 5, Application Service Layer, focuses on understanding the real heart of your application: how to design it, make it durable, and future proof it around a rapidly evolving platform using Martin Fowler's Service pattern as a template.

Chapter 6, Application Domain Layer, aligns Apex code typically locked away in Apex Triggers into classes more aligned with the functional purpose and behavior of your objects, using object-orientated programming (OOP) to increase reuse and streamline code and leverage Martin Fowler's Domain pattern as a template.

Chapter 7, Application Selector Layer, leverages SOQL to make the most out of the query engine, which can make queries complex. Using Martin Fowler's Mapping pattern as a template, this chapter illustrates a means to encapsulate queries, making them more accessible and reusable, and making their results more predictable and robust across your code base.

Chapter 8, Building User Interfaces, covers the concerns of an enterprise application user interface with respect to translation, localization, and customization, as well as the pros and cons of the various UI options available in the platform.

Chapter 9, Using Interfaces with Lightning Framework, explains the architecture of this modern framework for delivering rich client-device agnostic user experiences, from a basic application through to using component methodology to extend Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile.

Chapter 10, Providing Integration and Extensibility, explains how enterprise-scale applications require you to carefully consider integration with existing applications and business needs while looking to the future by designing the application with extensibility in mind.

Chapter 11, Asynchronous Processing and Big Data Volumes, shows that designing an application that processes massive volumes of data, either interactively or asynchronously, requires consideration in understanding your customer's volume requirements and leverages the latest platform tools and features, such as understanding the query optimizer and when to create indexes.

Chapter 12, Unit Testing, explores the differences and benefits of unit testing versus system testing. This aims to help you understand how to apply dependency injection and mocking techniques to write unit tests that cover more code scenarios and run faster. You will also look at leveraging practical examples of using the Apex Stub API with the ApexMocks open source library and testing client logic with the Jest open source library.

Chapter 13, Source Control and Continuous Integration, shows that maintaining a consistent code base across applications of scale requires careful consideration of source control and a planned approach to integration as the application is developed and implemented.

Chapter 14, Integrating with External Services, explores how you and your customers can extend your application securely with services and data hosted outside of the Lightning Platform, using both code and configuration tools such as Flow.

Chapter 15, Adding AI with Einstein, explores services and features provided by Salesforce in order for you and your customers to add AI and machine learning capabilities to your application and its data.

To get the most out of this book

In order to follow the practical examples in this book, you will need to install the Salesforce DX CLI and Salesforce Extensions for Visual Studio Code. You will also require access to a Salesforce Developer Edition Org via https://developer.salesforce.com/ and a temporary Salesforce DevHub org via https://developer.salesforce.com/promotions/orgs/dx-signup.

The following is the list of the software requirements for this book:

• Salesforce DevHub Org Trial
• Salesforce Developer Edition Org (to register your test package namespace)
• Salesforce DX CLI

• Salesforce Extensions for Visual Studio
• Salesforce Developer Console (partial usage as needed)
• GitHub Desktop client

Author disclosure

At the time of publication, Andrew Fawcett works as a VP, Product Management, within Salesforce. The statements and opinions in this book are his own and not those of Salesforce.

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Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The --package parameter uses the package alias as defined in the sfdx-project.json file to identify the package we are creating this version against."

A block of code is set as follows:

{
 "packageDirectories": [
 {
 "path": "force-app",
 "package": "FormulaForce App",
 "default": true
 }

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    ],
    "namespace": "fforce",
    "sfdcLoginUrl": "https://login.salesforce.com",
    "sourceApiVersion": "45.0",
    "packageAliases": {
        "FormulaForce App": "0Ho6A000000CaVxSAK"
    }

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sfdx force:org:open

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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