Building Javascript Apps for Salesforce:

A reverse learning approach

Tomas de Camino, Fab-Lab Director at Veritas University, Costa Rica, is one the most active innovators I have seen in my life. Obsessed promoter of 3D printing, Arduino and the maker movement, he is always looking for new ways to share his knowledge with curious people. He has an amazing academic and experimental background that goes from mathematical biology through generative design and music . With such experience and impressive attitude about teaching I felt very happy to discover that his philosophy is exactly what we at 3VOT promote as the best path to learn new things:

“My teaching philosophy has always been to make first and just then, understand, rationalize what was done, the teacher and student as one, side by side, and we all learn in the process.” Tomas de Camino.

Since last year everybody has been talking about the benefits of learning Javascript for Salesforce, however, it seemed to be a very abstract proposal, most of the time based in examples and tutorials of a very basic level that could hardly be the starting point of any serious enterprise project.

During Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce gave this discussion a 180° turn. They talked about modular and reusable JS components as the future of how every company should customize their own SF Apps and how the partner community should evolve. They also talked about every company becoming a software company rather than expecting a one size fits all solution.

Now the JS inside Salesforce subject is at the top of its momentum, but is not always easy to find the right path to get started. Fortunately 3VOT already went through that path, it started 5 years ago in real life enterprise projects, and the most important: built a tool for that, Clayforsalesforce is a production line for SF Apps with Javascript. It takes the most advanced modularity and reusability architectures from the open source JS community and make them available to Salesforce developers. CLAY is as simple to use that automates 70% of the process, you can run your first app in 15 minutes.

With Clay you can clone sample Apps and start learning enterprise grade Javascript by seeing how it works and by making your own changes to the code. We also have a commercial program called Clay Hybrid in which Clay’s architect can build you a custom framework for your project, show it to your own dev team and train them in the basics of the architecture for them to continue adding new functionality and improvements. This approach provides a fast learning curve that will add lots of value to your developers.

Clay accelerates development, standardizes enterprise apps, can integrate more than 100.000 components into SF; but we think it is more powerful than just that. It will transform the user experience in the enterprise just in the way in which the Iphone transformed mobility for ever. Take a look at a sample UI here.

Enterprise software is about to be fully transformed by JS and reverse learning seems to be key to evolve at the speed that the open-source and social-networking worlds are doing it.

If you are interested in taking a look to our reverse learning approach just tweet me @armova and will set up a call to help you get started in the blink of an eye.