Following yesterday’s VMforce announcement there have been questions raised as to what this means for Apex and Visualforce and thus far there has been no clear message from salesforce.com on this subject. I mean to change that now.To put this plainly, Apex and Visualforce are not going away.First a bit of background. As the original Product Manager for both Visualforce and Apex (disclosure: still responsible for them indirectly) and Java developer who was responsible for an app written on a similar architecture to VMforce you might consider my
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An Introduction to Visualforce
The latest update to the Core Resource articles is the introduction to Visualforce. Intended mainly for developers who may not have had a formal introduction or would like to get a sense of the surface area of the force.com UI technology it should be a worthwhile read. Here's the abstract:
Visualforce is the component-based user interface framework for the
Force.com platform. The framework includes a tag-based markup language,
similar to HTML. Each Visualforce tag corresponds to a coarse or
fine-grained user interface component, such as a section of a page, or
a field. Visualforce boasts over 60 built-in components, and a
mechanism whereby developers
Force.com platform. The framework includes a tag-based markup language,
similar to HTML. Each Visualforce tag corresponds to a coarse or
fine-grained user interface component, such as a section of a page, or
a field. Visualforce boasts over 60 built-in components, and a
mechanism whereby developers
Visualforce Email Templates, now with PDF Attachments!
The Winter '09 release includes some incredible functionality for developers. One thing that I find particularly impressive is the new email template functionality that leverages Visualforce. Admittedly I am slightly biased (as a member of the Visualforce team) but I'm not the only one that feels this way.
There have been other references to this new technology even within this blog as well. Even if you have seen it something that hasn't received sufficient coverage to date is the ability to create dynamic email attachments and have them be converted to PDF automatically. Kudos to Steve for posting a… Continue reading
Group, Sum and Order data in Apex
Last week I offered a solution for sorting in Apex in response to some discussions taking place on the discussion boards . As promised, I’m back to discuss one approach to addressing the business problem highlighted in a very detailed fashion in this thread.
The relevant technical requirement outlined therein can be paraphrased
as “How can I group, sum and order opportunity information in Apex?”
And of course doing so with the minimal impact against the respective
governor limits.
The end result should look something like this:
Let’s address each of the goals in sequence… Continue reading
Sorting collections in Apex and “Too many script statements”
There’s been a little chatter recently about the script statement limit and specifically around sorting algorithms in Apex.
Instead of burying the solution deep in the annals of the discussion boards, Jon has convinced me to start publishing again. For those that haven’t been reading this blog since the days it was proudly branded "sforce", my last post was on 6/13/2005!
Needless to say that’s been too long and speaking of that, you’re probably saying get on with it already so I will 
It all started with this little post back when Apex was in developer preview at which time we… Continue reading
