Visit Josh Birk's personal blog on Developer Force

Hybrid Apps: Mobile Device Functionality with JavaScript and Cordova

With a hybrid application, using JavaScript to build your application doesn’t mean you have to forego accessing important aspects of the native device like the camera. Here’s a quick overview of how a hybrid application uses the Cordova project to bridge between web and native. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Setting Up Jenkins for Force.com Continuous Integration

A conversation that Force.com developers almost inevitably find themselves in the career is: how to maintain a development cycle within a team across multiple instances. It can be a fairly daunting one, especially depending on the complexity of your team and project. A question that almost universally comes up in the face of the complexity is: what tool can we use to automate this? Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Using PHP for Canvas Applications

Canvas is a great and simple method of including your third party integrations within the Salesforce UI, and PHP is still one of the most commonly used web application languages on the planet – so how do you use these two great technologies together? Using Canvas with the language of your choice is very similar to integrating with our API’s – the first real obstacle is authenticating the user. After that you can access our API’s, and Canvas gives a speedy path to doing that with just JavaScript. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Apex Template: Visualforce Controller

Last week, we took a look at a skeletal version of a class implementing the asynchronous aspects of Apex: batch, scheduled and email. While powerful, it’s a corner of Apex developers don’t always have a use case to tread down into. This week, let’s look at something a lot more common: Visualforce controllers – quite possibly the most common use of Apex on the planet. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Apex Template: Asynchronous Apex

While I often focus on specific code to solve specific problems, I thought I’d start a series of blog posts which focus more on how to start specific kinds of classes you might use with Apex. We’ll kick things off by looking at one class that implements the interfaces which allow Apex to operate asynchronously. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Editing Streaming Topics with Visualforce (and controlling Visualforce state)

I created a quick Visualforce page to help manage the Streaming API I had been testing out in my dev org. Having spent a lot of time lately tinkering with jQuery and JavaScript Remoting based interfaces, I also wanted to use this as an excuse to go back to developing with a normal viewstate-based form, especially since I knew it would probably easier to bind the PushTopic object against the apex form tags than to roll my own solution for it. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Obrigado, Brasil!

Reid Carlberg and I have barely been able to catch our breath since returning from Brazil about a week ago, so we haven’t had much of a chance to thank everyone who attended the three city tour. The excitement we found was overwhelming, with every city along the way being completely packed. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Leave a comment

We’re Off To Brazil for a Developer Week

Starting next week, Reid Carlberg and I will be taking to the Brazilian streets for a three city tour kicking off in Sao Paulo. This marks a second international developer week this year, and there’s no indication of us slowing down anytime soon. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Using Apex to retrieve RSS Feeds

I was rather glad to see a question come up on the the Salesforce StackExchange about how to load data from RSS into custom objects, as it was one of the few times that I could offer a complete solution without setting aside a couple hours to test out some new code (not that I mind doing that, any good excuse to write some Apex for a few hours…). As it happens, I was already doing this internally to help our team of crack evangelists track blog posts. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Using SmartStore with Native iOS

images

Our Mobile SDK features a great bit of technology called SmartStore, which allows for secure offline storage of data. SmartStore’s core goal is fill the void for encrypted data with HTML5 development, but that doesn’t mean native code can’t access the same features. Via HTML5, SmartStore is connected with a Cordova plugin – so when coding in Objective-C we just need to refer to to same libraries directly. Continue reading

In Blog: developer-relations | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments