Dreamforce 2012 is only a little over four months away now, and preparations are in full swing here at Developer Force. Today we announce the Dreamforce 2012 Developer Track Call for Papers – your chance to get onstage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center in September and share your experience and expertise with hundreds or even, via the YouTube replays, many thousands of fellow developers.

We are accepting session proposals from today until June 4, so get your thinking cap on and head over to the CFP site for a list of suggested topics, instructions for submitting a proposal, the full… Continue reading

Following up on the blog post I wrote back in January, Chuck Mortimore, Senior Director of Product Management for Identity and Security, and I will be presenting a webinar on Friday April 20th: ’Social Sign-On with Authentication Providers’.

Chuck will provide an overview of the Spring ’12 Authentication Provider functionality, contrasting it with the existing SAML single sign-on implementation and giving practical advice on how to choose one versus the other. I’ll show how to configure an Authentication Provider to login to a customer portal from Facebook, LinkedIn or Google via Janrain, and then Todd Bursey of FinancialForce will explain… Continue reading

Hackathons are all the rage – we’ve run them regularly at events such as Dreamforce and Cloudstock, and there was even an article in Wired recently chronicling the results of throwing several teams of developers, designers and other interested people into a room for a couple of days with the goal of creating the next big app. Some hackathons are purely social events, others are sponsored by technology vendors, but a few are internal contests, run by companies as a fun way to expose their employees to new tools and methodologies.

Last week, Dave and I attended a hackathon at Dominion Enterprises, in… Continue reading

Thanks to all who attended my session, ‘Create a Force.com-Powered Facebook App on Heroku’, at Cloudstock last week. I included links to a whole bunch of useful resources, but I know a few people didn’t get a chance to copy them down; folks in the general session that saw the Facebook app on towards the end of Adam Wiggins’ presentation on Heroku might also be interested in how that app was created, so here are links to my slides, the app, and all the resources I mentioned. I’ll also add a link to the session recording as soon as it’s… Continue reading

Novice Force.com developers tend to intensely dislike the limits that come along with a multitenant environment – for example, the governor limits on Apex Code. With more experience, a love/hate relationship develops, as limits start to catch bugs such as infinite loops. The true Force.com guru embraces limits as a guide to proper coding style for maximizing performance by (amongst other things) minimizing database access.

Writing a Ruby application on Heroku, calling the Database.com or Force.com APIs, it’s easy to forget all about limits, particularly when you can scale your app up to any number of dynos (a dyno being… Continue reading

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

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

A little while ago, Paul McGurn blogged how to create a public (SOAP-based) web service via a Force.com Site. As Paul explains, you add your web service class to the Enabled Apex Classes in the Site’s Public Access Settings. You’ll also need to add the appropriate object and field-level permissions for any data you will be exposing; remembering, of course, that this web service will be accessible without any authentication!

As I was setting up a WebHook the other day, I realized that the same principle applies to Apex REST Methods – add the class and any… Continue reading

At 7am and 10am Pacific Time this Thursday, Feb 23, Adam Torman, Bud Vieira and Chuck Mortimore (otherwise known as the ABC of security at salesforce.com) will be presenting Security in the Cloud: Identity & Access Management for Database.com, a developer-eye view of platform security.

From OAuth, through user profiles, roles and permission sets, right down to record-level controls, Adam, Bud and Chuck will explain how the platform (Database.com and Force.com) authenticates users, authorizes applications and controls access to data via a simple, flexible sharing model.

Whether you’re writing a Force.com app in Apex, a Heroku app in… Continue reading