As industry-leading CRM consultants focusing on Salesforce solutions, Tokara Solutions can help you optimize your systems and maximize your investment in Salesforce, from its primary components like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to frameworks that amp up CRM capabilities, like Salesforce Visualforce and APEX.
Following on last week’s posting introducing some basics of Visualforce development, today’s will look at a few of the ways Salesforce Visualforce streamlines and simplifies the development process, as well as how it delivers powerful control to developers, coupled with unparalleled design flexibility.
Simpler and Faster
One benefit of using Visualforce to supplement the development capabilities of the Salesforce1 platform is its user-friendly layout that makes it simple to edit or adjust a page without a major overhaul. Visualforce markup appears in the same window as the resulting page, so developers are constantly aware of its state and appearance each time they save their code.
Other conveniences include auto-completion, concise syntax (90% fewer lines of code than s-controls) and “quick fixes” that activate spur-of-the-moment design decisions, including a tool that creates a new Visualforce page as soon as you type its title in your URL. Additionally, its Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture splits the style development between look and feel (determined by designers) and functionality (determined by developers), freeing up your team to work individually on separate components.
Developer-Driven Control
The Visualforce markup can include Visualforce tags, HTML, JavaScript, or any Web-enabled code embedded within an tag. This language controls which user interface components are defined, such as buttons or links, and how they are laid out on the page, giving developers the option to control these components via the standard logic provided on the Force.com platform, or through custom logic, defined by a class written in Apex.
Flexibility of Design
Visualforce pages can be used to override certain elements that come standard on the platform, including buttons and tab overview pages. In the place of default elements, custom tabs and dashboard components can be created, as well as new menu items and actions, custom console components, and even new help pages patterned around specific organizational terms. And because Visualforce markup is ultimately rendered as HTML, Visualforce developers can also integrate its tags with other Web-based user interface technologies, including standard HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and other HTML-executable code for a greater range of design possibilities.
Visualforce is available in the Salesforce1 Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, and Developer editions. Compiled and rendered entirely by the Force.com platform, Visualforce pages are stored as metadata and are automatically upgraded when other parts of the system are enhanced.
You can find out more about Visualforce and how the Tokara team can help you maximize your investment in CRM technology by visiting the Visualforce Development page of our website, or by downloading the Visualforce Development datasheet on our Resources & Downloads page. If you’d like to speak with one of our experienced CRM consultants or engineers for greater detail on the performance benefits Salesforce1 users are seeing from Visualforce development, we’d love to speak to you. We encourage you to contact any member of our consulting team at [email protected], or reach out directly to Tokara’s VP of Business Development, Mark Fillingim, at +1 972-719-0213.
NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT
