Deploy Applications to Production Faster

By jesse lorenz | Published: September 3, 2008

The Force.com IDE
exposes the Metadata API,
to provide administrators and developers with some very powerful deployment
capabilities. Steve Andersen recently blogged about these capabilities and about how using the
Force.com IDE made his deployment process more efficient. Once Steve started
deploying via the Force.com IDE, his typical deployment process dropped from 8
hours per customer to about 2 hours. As a Force.com Technical Evangelist, I can
confirm Steve’s findings. I too have found the Force.com IDE to be a powerful
deployment tool and recently learned a new trick that has made it even more
efficient: Deploy the smallest subset of
configuration changes possible.

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  • http://developer.force.com/ Jon Mountjoy

    Cool Jesse. I’m getting into the Metadata API myself. I think of it as a combination of an introspection service (is that the right way to look at it?) and a creation service (I can create the metadata, not only introspect).

  • http://developer.force.com Jesse Lorenz

    Jon, the docs describe the Metadata API as “A development resource for retrieving and deploying setup information in your organization.” So, your characterization seems accurate.
    Developers will also likely want to explore the describe* calls in the Web Services API which are more appropriate for scenarios where the developer wants to manage data instead of the data model.