In less than two weeks, San Jose Convention
Center will be hosting the Cloudforce 2 Tour. If you have ignored the
event announcements elsewhere thinking that this event may not be
relevant to techies and it is all marketing oriented, look again. This
event is also a developer conference.
Every year Salesforce.com hosts the Dreamforce event where customers and
developers get together to learn about the newest and greatest
developments in the platform and in the products. You can consider the
June 22nd event as a mini version of this event. However, it is FREE and
there are many sessions for developers that allows non-customers to
attend and learn about various levels of the Force.com platform.
We, developer evangelists, are in
“charge” of 3 developer sessions each this time. I am responsible for an
interesting mix of talks that are particularly exciting. Here is what
is in the store.
Welcome to the Cloud: Force.com for Java
Developers: 1:30-2:30pm
This session is for Java developers who are curious about Force.com platform and want to learn more. We will start with the benefits and the services that are
available for building applications unique to Force.com. We will discuss
existing connectivity (WS-API) and upcoming connectivity APIs (JPA) to
Force.com database and talk about application and deployment scenarios.
We will cover several concrete JPA connectivity cases as well as built
in services in Force.com. Further, we will discuss VMforce and it
synergizes with the Force.com philosophies.
In this session, the VMforce architect Fiaz Hossain and the VMforce Product Manager Jesper Joergensen will be presenting with me with concrete examples of JPA, VMforce direction and will be providing the insights you may be looking for.
Advanced
Development with Apex and Visualforce: 2:45 – 3:45pm
This session highlights our
journey with the Apex and Visual Force technologies in the platform and
how Force.com has incorporated various user requested features and
directions, and will highlight the adoption of the technologies to
provide real world applications. You will hear about how the platform
matured and incorporated many features that are very key to building
apps.
I am specifically excited about this session, because our product
managers Andrew Waite and Taggart Matthiesen will focus in couple of
features that are currently in the works and illustrate how they are
targeted to make developers life easier in particular. Yes, our focused
theme is developer productivity. They will also cover the product
roadmap about requested features for the audience and provide several
exciting demos for what is in the store for the platform. Do not miss
it.
User
Experience Best Practices: How to build Force.com Apps that users will
love 4:00-5:00pm
This
session is dear to my heart and could not be more timely. User experience is what makes or breaks an application. Our
alliances manager Sati Hillyer and our user experience lead Ian Swinson
will talk about how developers should consider and integrate best
practices for user experience in their design. Yes, you will
learn that apps with killer usability do not necessarily start from
data modeling, and you will have to pay attention to a set of best practices in your app development so that the resulting app is widely successful and useful from the get go. The themes in this
session are very timely if you are considering building a full scale app from ground up. This session will also complement the Force.com Free Edition development sessions that Quinton Wall will be presenting in the conference nicely.
Other evangelists will probably talk about their sessions in other blogs, so I will not take away their thunder.
This is a FREE event, but it may fill up. Please make sure to sign up early and I look forward to meeting you there at the conference.