The following is a short interview with Succinctly series author Ed
Freitas, whose latest book, Force.com
Succinctly, waspublished recently. You can download the bookhere.
Force.com Succinctly
What should people
know about the subject of your book? Why is it important?
With Force.com, almost anyone can turn business ideas into
smart apps—without much code at all—running on one of the world's most trusted
cloud platforms: Salesforce. Every app is instantly mobile, connected, and
secure. It matters and it is important because the entry barrier is very low
and apps can be created quite easily.
When did you first
become interested in this subject?
I became interested in this subject when I was using
Salesforce as a user and found out that it was possible to extend the
functionality of the platform by creating custom objects and views (from those
objects) with a few clicks and barely any code.
By writing this e-book, did you learn anything
new yourself?
Yes, quite a lot in fact! Before the book I was a "normal" Salesforce user. I started to explore how to use Force.com to add extra functionality to my Salesforce apps. I suddenly discovered a whole new world of possibilities which I never thought were possible. What impressed me the most was the fact that almost no coding was required for things like custom form validations.
Ed Freitas
How will this subject change over the next few
years?
I
think it will continue to evolve and become even more easy to use, given the
depth and reach of Salesforce as a platform. It will continue to gain more
interest, especially among business users that want to develop customized solutions
which would take a lot of time using a traditional development approach.
Do you see the subject as part of a larger
trend in software development?
Yes, there is a larger trend in software development to make
things simpler, for both users and developers, even though we are seeing
opposite trends with some JavaScript frameworks (which require a lot of tooling
to get a simple application running). Force.com is leading the pack to some
extent in making development easier. To make an analogy, it's like what MS
Access would have looked like if it would have evolved into a multi-tenant
hosted service.
What other books or resources on this topic do
you recommend?
From my experience investigating this topic, I found that
the best resource for anything to do with Force.com was their own technical
documentation website, especially their Trail Heads section. Most of the
already existing books were either too "broad" or too
"advanced" to begin with, so I think Force.com Succinctly
comes in nicely to fill this gap.