The Force.com platform just passed a huge milestone—the billionth line of Apex code is now in production! Developers like yourself are responsible for this awesome momentum—not only writing code, but also writing over 8 million tests—contributing to a better platform & better products. Thank you!
This is evidence of a huge adoption and investment in Apex – the programming language used to write business logic, triggers for the database, web services, and the controllers in our MVC layer, Visualforce.
The Future of Apex
Where is Apex going? Every release of Force.com sees improvements:
- for example in Spring '11 the number of Apex governor limits (see multitenancy below) has been reduced from 70+ to 16
- the JavaScript remoting developer preview looks at how to make it easier to call into Apex from JavaScript
- better REST support has been hinted at
- better testing support too
Many other features are on the roadmap – but of course you'll have to wait for the next release to hear the official word on what's definitely coming. I can't commit to anything on this blog, except to say that it's pretty darn exciting.
Multitenancy: Apex, a language for the Cloud
Those billion lines of code run in a scalable multitenant architecture – it's a language for the cloud. Apex features such as governor limits (down to only 16 now) ensure that we're all good citizens, and those 8 million tests (testing of code is required before it can be pushed into production) help.
Indeed, those tests are not only executed by you guys – the developers – but also by the platform release machinery (3 or so times a year). On each new release of Force.com, those tests are run to ensure no regressions. That's something you can do in a multitenant system – our platform gets better the more people use it!
Declarative: Stuff you didn't write in Apex
It took me a while to "actively forget" the things I didn't have to code when moving to Force.com – apps require much less coding because of the declarative programming model provided by the platform.
So what you won’t find in those billion lines of Apex are:
- security or user management,
- workflow and approval logic,
- multilanguage & multicurrency support
- data sharing and more
Instead, it's all there, part of Force.com – out of the box.
Recent Resources
As part of the celebration of that billionth line of Apex, we've updated a released a few new Apex resources. Check 'em out:
- An Introduction to Force.com Apex Code
- Webinar: Apex Code – Intro to Programming on the Force.com Platform
- Apex Code Best Practices
- Apex Code Testing and Coverage Best Practices (upcoming – go ahead and register)
Happy coding all!