Architecting on Force.com

By Jon Mountjoy | Published: January 27, 2009

It’s pretty easy to start creating great apps on Force.com – check out my database article, for example, to see how a full set of CRUD screens are automatically generated around a database model.

However, don’t let this stop you from thinking about design and architecture!

For example, Force.com has some amazing data security features – the sharing-model in particular is extremely powerful, letting you (declaratively) determine who sees which records, which set of users can share records with which other set of users and so on. Taking a feature like this sharing model into consideration when creating your application will undoubtedly lead to a better application, and one that requires fewer changes as it evolves.

So with this in mind, check out Ten Common Mistakes Architects Make When Building a Force.com Application, contributed by Ketan Khandkar. Ketan covers several other points that are well worth considering if you architect apps on the platform.

An Aside:

Speaking architecture, you may be interested to know how Force.com itself is architected, in particular how multitenancy underpins so much of the platform. If so, check out this webinar happening on Feb 12.

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  • http://www.coda2go.com Andrew Fawcett (CODA)

    At CODA we are heavily into the implementation of design patterns within our Java and .Net based products, and as such found ourselves quickly wanting to benefit from them on the Salesforce platform as we embarked on our CODA2go project to build a new Finance system. To date we have implemented Domain Model, Unit of Work, Identity Map, Lazy Load, Data Mapper and Service Layer. The platform also provides a solid implementation of the Model View Controller pattern through its new Visualforce technology.
    Read more about our approach on the CODA 2go blog, http://blog.coda2go.com/2008/01/31/architecting-on-forcecom/

  • http://www.coda2go.com Kevin Roberts

    “Ten Common Mistakes” is a nice summary for anyone looking to develop more advanced applications on force.com . It highlights a couple of important points I think. On the one hand in your design try to leverage standard platform features wherever you can. However your still need best practices in terms of code re-use, optimization and testing to develop a true industrial strength application.

  • http://www.opthome.com Steven Palmer

    Jon, this was an excellent read. Thank you.

  • http://developer.force.com/ Jon Mountjoy

    Thanks for all the great comments guys!

  • http://blog.coda2go.com/ Emma Hoyle

    In this podcast http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2009/01/software-delivery-infocus-podcast.html, Debbie Ashton, CODA’s product director, talks about our experiences of developing CODA 2go for delivery from the Force.com cloud-based software platform.
    Includes lessons learned and is essential reading for anyone thinking about developing on a cloud platform.