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Amazing Value, Delivered

By Ron Hess | Published: June 14, 2009

Wow, today's a big day with the announcement that Force.com Sites is now live for our customers.  This announcement means big things for all the members of our ecosystem.  I'll throw out a few examples that I've thought of, i'm sure you can think of a few more.  Needless to say the announcements today really sets a high bar for delivering value and containing costs.  Oh yeah, in case you haven't seen it, the other announcement is a new Free Platform edition!

As a developer at heart, I love exploring new technology and Sites has held my fancy for a while
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Best Practice: Sites and record identifiers

By Ron Hess | Published: April 13, 2009

Now that Force.com Sites is out in the developer community as a preview, we are starting to see several interesting and powerful use cases that involve generating forms that will input data into the Force.com database.  As these use cases come up, we are often asked is it acceptable from a security perspective to allow the Sites Public User to input data directly into the database ? 

The answer is Yes, however as a developer it's important to understand there is a safe way, and there is a casual way that could cause problems.

To explain the alternatives I'll construct a… Continue reading

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Cloud Loader on Code Share

By Ron Hess | Published: March 31, 2009

The code share project continues to grow and the latest addition is a very interesting twist on Amazon & Force.com called Cloud Share.  There are several cool apps to move data, including my old favorite excel connector, but if i were writing a tool today, I probably would end up with something close to this.

John describes the idea behind this tool in his blog, and I would like to commend Model Metrics for contributing this tool to the Code Share.  As for the features the tool provides, I really like the notifications and the automation feature, a must have for… Continue reading

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Google Translate on Force.com

By Ron Hess | Published: January 21, 2009
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This week I'm joining my colleagues and folks from Google and Amazon at the Cloud Connect event here in Mountain View.  We are discussing how these great clouds can be used together to build truly useful solutions for the enterprise.  While prepping for the chalk talks, I was looking for some code that I wanted to show off.  I looked first in this Blog, then in the developer wiki, still no luck so I jumped over to the Code Share project directory and drilled into the Google Data Toolkit project and found it.What I was looking for, and found, was… Continue reading

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Force.com Sites and CAPTCHA

By Ron Hess | Published: December 12, 2008
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I recently attended our Developer User Group meeting in NYC, we had a great time reviewing code and talking about Visualforce, Apex Code and Force.com Sites.

The UG meeting was held in the evening (6-9pm) at Le Meridien and more than 60 developers came out to learn about the Force.com platform, building apps and to learn from each other.

I gave a quick technical overview of the Force.com platform and spent a bit more time on new technologies such Sites and Force.com for Google App Engine. Ketan Khandkar, Principal at Navatar Group gave a presentation and covered some best practices for… Continue reading

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Visualforce meets Google Maps and Earth

By Ron Hess | Published: November 7, 2008
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Dreamforce has wrapped up and I can focus on distributing some of the very cool work that we built during the run up to Dreamforce.    One of the great projects that we built for this year’s conference was the Google Map and Earth project, using Visualforce components and Apex code.  The team at Salesforce Foundation alerted me to the need for this project, and then it sort of took on a life of it’s own; I love it when that happens.   At the highest level, these simple classes, pages and components show off the very cool new technology from… Continue reading

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Coding The Cloud at Google’s I/O Event

By Ron Hess | Published: May 16, 2008

Ever since the introduction of Apex SOA / Callouts last spring, I’ve wanted to revisit the GData integration sample code that was originally built using JavaScript. Now with the upcoming Google I/O developer event in San Francisco on our speaking calendar, I am putting the finishing touches on a great Apex to Google demo. In my Google I/O presentation, I will explain and demonstrate how you can quickly achieve a custom integration between your force.com platform apps and Google GData interfaces. Yes, Apex speaks REST, and you can learn how. Salesforce.com is honored to be one of the companies that… Continue reading

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Updating a Classic

By Ron Hess | Published: April 30, 2008

With all the excitement around Tour de Force, and the upcoming trip to London for Dreamforce Europe, I  wanted make sure you didn’t miss a cool update to a classic AppExchange app called PrintAnything.  A while back I wrote a blog post that covered how to integrate PrintAnything with Google Docs to generate PDF output.   Now, with the updated version of PrintAnything called Astitch Document Generator, you can perform this directly using the service provided by Astitch.net.

There are two things I like about this app, first off it’s free and secondly it’s a technically deep product, lots of customizations… Continue reading

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Get Social with Force.com

By Ron Hess | Published: November 2, 2007

OpenSocial, What will you build ?

Last night, I had the privilege of sitting around a campfire at the Google campus (and literally roasting marshmallows) with other internet leaders like Ning, LinkedIn and hi5 to support the launch of Google OpenSocial APIs  (official Google OpenSocial blog ), a set of common APIs that let developers create applications that run across any OpenSocial-compatible site .

As one of the initial OpenSocial "containers" or host sites, salesforce.com has been working closely with Google and our partners Theikos and Appirio to roll out an initial set of tools, reference code and demos on ADN to… Continue reading

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Visualforce Getting Started

By Ron Hess | Published: October 22, 2007

As many of you already know, Salesforce.com has recently opened up the Visualforce Developer Preview program to all customers, partners and prospects.  You can quickly sign up for this program on the ADN website, and now I’m excited to announce a detailed tutorial that has just been added to all the great Visualforce content already available. This is an easy to understand article which walks you through hello-world and much more, many thanks to Jon Montjoy, this is one you will want to bookmark!

Just a quick sampling of the ADN content shows that we have something for everyone, if you… Continue reading

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