My Favorite Salesforce Spring '11 Feature

Man is a social animal. That is one thing man is sure about history, rest all is still a mystery. Once upon a time, man invented fire, to socialize with his friends at night. Then many million years later, people build houses countries and stuff and then he thought, what the, my friends are gone, whom will I socialize at night? And thus he invented the internet... true story. Well, not exactly true, but who cares, we are social now.

When I wake up early morning, I no longer check if there were any mis-cals last night, I also check if there were twitter mentions, facebook notifications for me. And my android facilitates all this with a single swipe of my thumb. The bottom line, we are social. And if you still don't have a internet line on your computer, you probably are still living in caves.

So Salesforce has grown, grown large like a big puppy and oh, it has also learned some new tricks. The latest release of Salesforce spring 11 boast of more social, more mobile, more success. Oh well, after the big bang of Database.com and Chatter.com at the Dreamforce 10 (read about keynotes here) this was expected of Salesforce and must say, so far, we are not disappointed.

So my favorite Salesforce Spring 11 features:

1.   Apex Governor Limits:
-The total number of DML statements issued for a process has gone from 20 for triggers, and 100 for everything else, to 150 for all contexts.
-Total number of records retrieved by SOQL queries has gone from 10,000 to 50,000
Do I see developers rejoicing?

2. Chatter Updates:
Oh well, Chatter has gone the twitter way and now we have @mentions the #hastags as well as Like button.


3. Visual Workflow

Now, this is a feature I would like to know more about. From the look of it, it looks like another computer software to replace me.... sigh.... still, since I used Appinventor development without coding, I feel I might like this. Still more on this later.

4. REST Api
Coming Spring 11, REST Api will be generally available and now you can connect to SFDC using OAuth protocol. To dig deeper on rest API, you should probably dig deeper here.

5. Google Chrome Support for Salesforce
This was the massive idea on IdeaExchange and even I had voted for it. Glad to see it there.

6. Visualforce Pages Inline Editing
Aaah, finally, one attribute that will support Inline editing, no need to play with ActionSupport OnClick event and rendering events. So far release notes say that there are two forms of inline editing support: the <apex:detail> component has been enhanced to support inline editing, and the<apex:inlineEditingSupport> component has been added, which gives inline editing functionality to several container components. More on this soon.

7. Visualforce Dynamic Binding
I have not yet fully understood this feature but the demo looks awesome. I will write another blog post for VF enhancements soon.

8. Javascript Remoting
Now we can directly call Apex classes in VF using Javascript and @Remoting call.

@RemoteAction global static String getItemId(String objectName) {
 /* ... */
}

Nice isn't it?

There are many more enhancements coming to us this year. With so many bangs at the beginning of the year, we should expect more adrenalin rush the complete year, isn't it?

Just, Fyi, I have build my first app on android, will share the Apk with anyone who is willing to test it. Now going for a full blown app to host on the market, keep fingers crossed.

Cheers,

P.s. Moved my signature from Sidoscope here. How is it?