The best way to learn a platform is to use a platform

Wow what a week it’s been. First week back from vacation and I’m diving right into a sprint of stuff that needs to be delivered to the customer. My task for the week has been develop a connectivity layer between Salesforce and Dropbox using OAuth. This task has taken me on quite a learning journey.

Now I’ll call myself quite a seasoned programmer but ever since joining Salesforce 9 months ago I’ve had to relearn a lot of stuff. A new programming language in Apex, new framework technologies such as Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) and the Lightning Platform and the entire underlying Salesforce Platform which is enormous. There are just different ways to do stuff… Previously I would have had my choice of any language, technology and framework to solve the issue but now those are kind of given.

Just this afternoon as I was putting the final semi-colons in the core OAuth layer (Apex), the Dropbox specific OAuth layer (Apex), the business specific facade class in front of those layers (Apex) and the management pages for the integration (Lightning) I was reminded of an old quote from an old biochemistry text book of mine: “The best way to learn a subject is the teach the subject”. And that continues to hold true and is equally true when saying “the best way to learn a platform is to build on the platform”. I’ve learned much stuff about Apex and Lightning in the past week. All the cool stuff you can do but also some of the crazy stuff that falls into that “you have have to know that”-category. But for all those things it holds true that you have to spend the time to reap the benefits.

For now I’ll just say that although the Apex language has it quirks and the compiler is definitely showing age (and Salesforce knows this – a new compiler is being developed or at least that’s what I heard in a Dreamforce 2016 session) there is still much so much power in the language. Is there stuff you cannot do? Sure! But there are cool interfaces like System.StubProvider which I read and hear little talk about. The built in support to unit tests and mocking of HTTP requests is awesome and allows you to quickly and easily stub out calls to external services. The runtime screams with performance and I’m pretty impressed about the speed with which my code runs.

Good stuff!

So in closing – I have my OAuth layer done, unit tested and commited. I’ll surely be blogging about how to chose to build it so others may learn from it if they want to spend the time and learn the platform.