If you have old sandbox instances which haven’t been accessed for some time, they may be slated for deletion beginning on January 11th.   Why delete old sandboxes?  It’s part of our commitment to maintain the long term growth of the community and to better utilize capacity.

Your sandbox may be on the list if:

1. It is on instance CS0, CS1, CS2 or CS4.
2. No user has logged in within 90 days.

However, before you do too much detective work into determining whether or not your sandbox will be slated – you will also be receiving… Continue reading

In case you missed Katie’s post a while back, we have a contest underway through the holidays for your best, secret recipe for the Cookbook.

To rehash the details: submit your recipe before Dec 31 at 11:59pm to enter the judging to possibly win a MacBook AIR.

The same process we usually undertake for recipes apply: our staff here will look at your recipe to determine the following:

• Is the problem being addressed relevant?
• Is the solution unique?
• We may also provide feedback on stylistic elements (wording, elegance of code, etc)

At the… Continue reading

Recently, I came across a very interesting article that got me thinking (not always an easy thing to do). The post was by a member of the LinkedIn Engineering team and it described their move away from a  a Java Servlet/JSP stack to a JavaScript templating library called dust.js. You might think of that as a fairly esoteric topic, but the article provides a real-life example of a UI architecture that I believe will be especially germane in a world where polyglot and mobile apps proliferate. Let me explain.

Before I get into the reasons why I find this architecture particularly interesting… Continue reading

Here our some of our favorite tweets of the past week from the world of Force.com. Follow @forcedotcom to keep up with these characters!

One of the more common requirements encountered when developing Enterprise mobile applications is the need for Push Notifications – i.e. the ability to ‘push’ updates to a mobile device based on some action/event on the server side. Both iOS and Android support push notifications – via Apple Push Notification Service and the Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework (C2DM) respectively. The details obviously vary between the iOS push notification service and the Android one, but the basic architecture is the same. For sending a push notification to an iOS/Android device, you first send the message to Apple/Google using their specified network and authentication protocols… Continue reading

HTML5 is one of those buzzwords/technologies that seems to be all over the (virtual) airwaves these days. As is inevitable with such hype, there are many instances where HTML5 has become an overloaded/misused term (for e.g. many developers mistakenly believe that Geolocation is part of the HTML5 standard. It isn’t). Moreover, the standard is still maturing and there are things you can’t do with HTML5 (yet). All that being said, it is undeniable that HTML5 is the future of web development and as such is one of the most important standards/technologies to stay abreast with. It has an especially important role… Continue reading