I’ve long been a Twilio fan – their API does a fine job abstracting away the details of telephony, so I, as a developer, can focus on writing great SMS and voice-oriented apps. Now, with the new Twilio Helper Library for Salesforce, it’s easier than ever to use that API from Force.com.

The official announcement has links to the library code on GitHub, full documentation, and more, but, when I got wind of the new library, I thought it might be fun to dive right in and write a simple SMS app on Force.com, allowing you to send messages from a Visualforce page… Continue reading

The Streaming API has transitioned from Developer preview to Generally Available! What this means is that any org with API access also has Streaming Access enabled now. To get started, take a look at the following documentation and examples:

• Force.com Streaming API Developer Guide
• Visual Force Example
• Java Example
• Authentication Example

If you have questions or comments, you can post them in the Streaming API discussion board.

Lastly, if you’re local to Northern California or will just be in the neighborhood on March 15, don’t forget to sign up for Cloudstock 2012 at… Continue reading

I’m always on the lookout for interesting open source projects coming from the Force.com community – there’s some cool code out there, and it’s good to share it. Here’s a trio of projects I’ve recently encountered; they’re all ‘under construction’, so do your due diligence if you’re planning to drop them into a production system, but there are some great opportunities here to get involved and make a contribution of your own.

• ApexBox, by Daniel Hoechst, provides an Apex Code wrapper for the Box API. There’s working code there for some of the File & Folder and Collaboration

We had a good time playing Cloud Trivia on our Developer Force Facebook Page last Friday.  Thanks to all of those to participated.

If you liked playing, come to Cloudstock on 3/15 in SF. We will be taking our Cloud Trivia Challenge to the next level with some awesome prizes and tougher questions.

Here is a list of the winners of our new Force.com T-Shirt:

Peter Gascoyne

Shamil Arsunukayev

Michael Fitzgerald

Ivan Melnikov

Srinivasa Rao

Jason Bennett

Nisse Knudsen

And congrats to Jason Bennett who one the Jambox Jawbone drawing*… Continue reading

As much as I enjoy sneaking off to sunny San Francisco to do the occasional webinar or developer convention – I also love hanging out with the local Midwestern community. I’ll be up in Milwaukee on March 1st to show some use cases of integrating jQuery with Force.com, and I’ll be followed by Salesforce wizard Brian Kwong demonstrating his journey from administrator to developer.

If you’re interested in getting a preview of some of the jQuery content, you can check out the jQuery session from Dreamforce 2011, or more specifically I’ll showing examples of using both jqPlot charting and… Continue reading

If you have been to our Developer Meetups, you know we love a good trivia challenge. It’s been awhile since we have had a one online and  couldn’t think of a better way to end the week. We are shaking it up a bit this time and will be posting the questions on our Facebook Page today.  First to answer each question correctly will get a cool, new Force.com T-shirt.  We promise that they won’t be as bright as what our team likes to wear. Like this guy. Or this one. First person to respond to a question correctly will… Continue reading

We’ve got a new article up over on the Wiki which should help Apex developers understand the capabilities of the sometimes cryptic Crypto class. Actually, the Crypto class isn’t all that cryptic, but there are some plays on words which I simply can’t pass up.

Using the Apex Crypto Class will walk developers through the basics of the class, the kinds of encryptions and decryption one can use and some sample code demonstrating a couple of use cases – including how to sign with your own private key. Head on over for some fine cryptographic knowledge… Continue reading