If you've already mastered the basics, my best advice for learning Force.com is to find a project and get to work.
- - Rexlo Joe, Lead Architect, Navatar Group
Landing on Wall Street with Force.com
Building a Consulting Practice Based in the Cloud
Sitting in his Wall Street office, Rexlo Joe is a long way from Tamil Nadu, the southern India state he once called home. But the subcontinent is never far from his mind. As lead architect for the Navatar Group, Joe supervises a 45-person team in New Delhi that has helped turn the firm into a leading provider of Force.com applications for the financial sector.
"From the beginning, I was impressed by how well Force.com leveraged what I already knew," Joe says. "I first saw that with the Force.com Web Services API, which allowed me to make good use of my familiarity with SQL database queries. I've gotten all the help I need from the Force.com discussion boards and code samples. If you've already mastered the basics, my best advice for learning Force.com is to find a project and get to work.”
Joe learned application development on the Force.com platform the same way he mastered his other programming skills—by jumping in. Back in India, he had worked his way through college by building internal Web pages for U.S. businesses, picking up Java, .NET, and AJAX along the way. He departed for America in 2004, completing a master’s degree in computer science at Farleigh Dickinson University's New Jersey campus, a short train ride from Manhattan. Two years later, Joe crossed the Hudson River and landed at Navatar's headquarters on Wall Street, where he first encountered Force.com. Founded by veterans of Deloitte Consulting, Navatar was one of the first to bring Wall Street experience to cloud computing.
Joe has gone on to master the Force.com development platform. His accomplishments include spearheading the development effort for Navatar’s suite of financial applications, including titles for banking, capital markets, and asset management, which are sold on salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace. The apps include custom screens developed specifically for the sector, and feature multiple levels of security.
Taking Force.com step by step
"My first task with Force.com was to design custom pages and load them as an S-control into an application," Joe recalls. “I went on to use the AJAX Toolkit as a way of mastering the Force.com Web Services API. As I moved on to Apex and Visualforce, I found a treasure trove of resources at developer.force.com, including sample code and the invaluable help of other developers.” As he has gained more skills, Joe has contributed back to the community by helping others.
Joe was an early adopter of Apex, taking full advantage of the server-side code to gain productivity. He found the language, with its Java-like syntax, so intuitive that he never had to stop development and pick up the instruction book. "With Apex, I can update five different tables with a single piece of code, rather than having to update each table separately. That means what took us 120 lines of client-side code can be accomplished in 10 lines of Apex. Equally important, Apex gives us transaction control, including commit and rollback, which are crucial for the kinds of applications we build."
Joe tackled building user interfaces with Visualforce in the same way he mastered Apex—by applying what he learned at the Force.com discussion boards to a development project. As with Apex, the Visualforce productivity benefits have been substantial. “We use Visualforce when clients want a more customized user interface. Visualforce has shortened that cycle dramatically. For example, the lines of code we’ve invested in the layout of one page can be reused in 40 other pages, and the subsequent changes we make to that code will be reflected throughout the application. And once we have this framework, we can apply it, directly or with modification, to any other product."
Development projects are coordinated between Joe and his New Delhi team using Navatar’s internal version control system, which is tightly integrated with the Eclipse-based Force.com IDE. “This setup has helped development personnel on two continents work more efficiently, especially when coordinating with our quality team” Joe says. “In addition, the Force.com IDE opened the door for us to write custom deployment scripts using the Metadata API, which we have used to add functionality to our clients’ custom applications.”
Strengthening client relations
Navatar has leveraged Force.com to strengthen client relations. For example, the firm takes advantage of Apex’s Java-like structure when a client’s IT department wants to take over the maintenance of a project. “Before Apex, our clients needed to be familiar with HTML, JavaScript and AJAX in order to understand the work we had done,” Joe recalls. “With Apex, they only need an understanding of Java to work through our custom code. And once clients are ready to take over, we can point them to the same rich set of developer resources on developer.force.com that we use."
Navatar has also taken advantage of salesforce.com’s developer preview programs, which puts new releases in the hands of developers ahead of launch. "Many of our clients are well aware of new Force.com platform releases and want to know what features could potentially benefit them," Joe says. "As a matter of practice, we now give them our best analysis—and that has served as an ongoing reminder that we really know our business."
These days, Rexlo Joe really knows his business, too. Having advanced from Force.com novice to expert, he is doing less coding and more inspiring, as he works with his New Delhi team. “I try to act as a resource for the group—answering their questions, pointing them in the right direction, and getting them to see the enormous opportunity of cloud computing development.”