Salesforce development is unique, and it differs from the traditional development of the application. The key difference between custom application development and salesforce development is that the code repository is the source of truth. Some recent changes released in salesforce DX allows you to develop similarly.
Salesforces offers great new features every year to improve the user experience. Some of the great features salesforce winter releases is offering are as follows:
- Flow updates
- Dynamic forms and actions
- Optimize the performance of the lighting page
- Einstein lead and opportunity scoring
- Salesforce anywhere
- Viewing changes to the deal
- Interactive email builder
- Dynamic survey pages
- Einstein search
- Auto-add fields to custom report types
Salesforce Development Models
Here is the list of various development models by salesforce.
Org development model
The org development allows working with orgs that do not track the source, such as developer Edition (DE) org, sandbox, production org, or trailhead playground.
In this development model, the changes need to be tracked manually. The changes to the sandboxes also need to be deployed manually to the production org.
The production org is the source of configuration, customizations, and truth for the code. All the releases and updates are developed with a deployment that is scoped to the production org. It makes sure that the team is familiar with all the technologies and lifecycle involved. But it can make it difficult for the team to coordinate efficiently as the model does not offer continuous integration. It does not have an agile methodology making it challenging to roll back releases and automate testing.
Developing with Org development model
Here are the steps for developing with the org model.
- Creating a project with manifest
- Using Org picker for authorizing an org you are going to be developing against
- Using org browser or manifest to get the source from the default org
- Deploying source to default org
Package development model
For complex and large salesforce development projects, usually, a team of a minimum of five developers is working on the selected feature set. Each developer is responsible for a different feature of the application. It is challenging to keep track of all the changes across the active team. It is vital to choose a development model that can help in tracking all changes efficiently. Currently, the only model that can support such a project is the package development model.
The package development model is an excellent choice because:
- It supports the concept of modular development within salesforce
- It allows you to break the large sets of functionality into smaller pieces making it easier to manage and track changes
- The model will enable you to organize the unpackaged metadata in the production org and create properly defined packages
- You can use salesforce DX projects to manage the source by organizing it into package directories
- You can use the directories to create easy-to-maintenance, upgrade, install, and update packages.
Developing with a package development model
Here are the steps for developing a project using a package development model.
- Creating a project
- Pushing and pulling source
- View changes
Conclusion
Make sure you take a close look at the pros and cons of developing a model before choosing. We offer development in both these models and delivers excellent results for your enterprise.
