Learn Salesforce Development in 180 Seconds
Use Case
You get pulled out of your software job to work in the sales department. It’s absolute chaos!
- Maria has a list of leads.
- James is handling customer complaints.
- Harish works the front desk.
- Tay manages billing and accounts.
- Tim is roaming the city meeting with clients.
Information is everywhere and hard to find. There are spreadsheets on leads, accounts, cases, opportunities and contacts, but they are disconnected and with different people.
You spin up an instance of Salesforce, a piece of customer relationship management (CRM) software and import all your data.
Now everything is linked and in one place. Each Salesforce tab represents a different spreadsheet or table.
You can access Salesforce from the web, but there’s a mobile app Tim can use on the go, too.
Development Part 1: Administration
With your new role as a Salesforce developer, you start to work on some custom features.
You work for a real-estate business, so you need to keep track of properties and brokers. Adding them is a simple administration task from the admin panel.
It’s as easy as navigating some drop-downs and radio buttons.
The admin panel also lets you manage user permissions, create the right data structure and perfect the page layouts. It can handle most of what you need to do.
Development Part 2: Apex
Next, you start work on an advanced feature. Your colleagues in the sales department want Salesforce to display the average property price in the suburb when a home enters the system.
You’ll need to write a bit of code to do get this working.
If you already know Java and SQL, you’ll be able to write a Salesforce ‘trigger’ and have a method that is called every time a property is created. Salesforce has substitutes for Java and SQL, called Apex and SOQL respectively.
Apex and SOQL are able to modify the entries in your objects (spreadsheets) and forward data or events to other servers.
Development Part 3: Lightning Components
Next, you want to add a map that pinpoints each property when you look at it in Salesforce.
We can still use Apex for our back-end, but we need a way to make it show up and fit in with the existing interface.
You can think of Lightning components as Salesforce ‘widgets’. It follows a component-based framework similar to React and Vue.
These widgets fit seamlessly into Salesforce and you can develop them in JS and XML, with an apex back-end.
Development Part 4: Visualforce
Now that you’re an expert, you can start adding entire pages to your Salesforce instance.
They could present custom views to the sales department or even be forms for your clients to fill out.
Armed with the power of HTML, CSS, JS and XML for your front-end and an Apex and SOQL back-end, you can add just about any kind of page you like.
Now, you have complete control over your Salesforce instance and can start tailoring it to your business’s needs.