Salesforce is a great platform to build modern apps that people love! The session on ‘Salesforce for Developers’ focused on together, how they can build smarter and faster apps. Srini Tallapragada, President, Technology in Salesforce was the host for the session. Leah McGowen Hare, Director, Technology and Products in Salesforce, Emily Rose, Lead Developer Evangelist in Salesforce and Wade Wegner, VP, Product Management, App Cloud in Salesforce, were the three speakers who had a discussion on app building techniques.

Developers are the ones who bring amazing innovations to the salesforce platform. The customer success platform of Salesforce is a single integrated platform which includes all tools and services to build modern apps. These tools range from no code to low code and then to code. The modern apps have a common data model and a shared identity.

Why use Salesforce to build apps?

Salesforce is the most trusted enterprise cloud with 108million+ customer tests executed per release, 400billion+ transactions per quarter, 180billion+ process executions per quartet, 90 billion+ apex executions 54billion+ API calls per quarter, 4.3billion+search queries per quarter.

There is no need to worry about trust, performance, identity, authentication or encryption as all these services are built in this platform which allows you to integrate with other third-party services.

Why developers like Lightning?

“People love apps that are delivered faster to meet their needs and the ones that are continuously improved.” – Carrie Mantione.

Lightning is the latest innovation and the fastest way to build modern apps. Here are the three factors that makes Lightning stand out:

• Lightning is a beautiful and engaging experience that comes out of the box.
• It is a framework that allows you to build modern apps fast
• It is a vibrant ecosystem of components and applications built by partners and developers.

The Lightning tools and builders comprises of app builder, community builder, component builder, process builder and schema builder.

The application architecture includes metrics, composition, customization, experience and navigation.

The component framework includes security services, data services, accessibility services, offline and mark-up language.

Winter ’17 release has seen new custom Lightning apps and great app developing features to build apps faster. Here are some of the new features:

• Lightning Data Service to access data without writing apex.
• Lightning Action to launch components to an action.
• Lightning Base Components to get buttons, input fields, spinners and more.
• Lightning Apps to assign custom record pages to your apps.
• Lightning Branding to add application specific logos and colors.
• Lightning Utility Bar to launch components from app-specific menus.

Customers need smarter apps.

“People love apps that are smart. They won’t use apps that aren’t.” – Sumir Saini.

DreamHouse App built on the salesforce platform, is a sample application that demonstrates the unique value proposition of the Salesforce App Cloud for building employee productivity and customer engagement apps.

Its architecture consists of ecosystem, user experience, analytics, data, journeys, mobile, intelligence, identity, notifications, community, IoT and logic. Lightning components are no longer limited to a page, they can be made quick actions.

Smarter apps can be build using Lightning components. Smart apps are event-driven. They can understand what is happening, they can anticipate what will happen next, and they can make recommendations as to what should happen next.

With Einstein Services, data can be captured and published by high throughput Event Service provided by Apache Kafka. Once the data is published, data can be trained classified and build models powered by machine learning by Apache PredictionIO and Salesforce Predictive Vision Service. Once the models are changed, surface predictions or recommendations can be made to use with no-code or code including Apex, JavaScript, Scala, Python and more.

Developers need to build apps together

“I am my best when I work together with my team and leverage the community.”- Adam Olshansky.

For continuous delivery of Salesforce App, there is brand new Salesforce DX (Developer Experience). Here are some of its features:

• Source Driven Development with version control code, metadata and org configuration.
• You can scratch orgs for Rapid Testing and Deployment.
• With Open and Standard Developer Experience, you can build the tools you love including Git, Selenium, Eclipse, Sublime and more.