We’re very excited to announce the Apex BOOST Library – a collection of Apex code to increase productivity, reduce bug counts, and slash the cost of Salesforce development.
Benefits
Developers: Our work as software developers is creative, fun, and meaningful. But programming is not just those things. As we all know, our daily work can be tedious and frustrating. Apex BOOST contains patterns and utilities that minimize the tedious and frustrating work – allowing developers to spend more time on creative and exciting tasks.
Customers: Do you have Salesforce processes that fail silently, don’t notify stakeholders, and are costly to fix? Are enhancement projects slow, bug-riddled, and expensive? Utilize Apex BOOST in your custom code to help address all these and other difficulties in custom development.
Consultancies: Salesforce partners can simultaneously impact developer and customer experiences by using Apex BOOST. Besides the direct benefits listed above, Salesforce teams will enjoy smoother, shorter, and less stressful projects. Customer satisfaction will rise as projects are finished on time and post-project issues are quickly surfaced and resolved.
Features
These enormous benefits are realized by addressing a surprisingly short list of issues that exist for many Salesforce implementations:
- Errors and failures are ignored or not handled properly
- Diagnostic code is incomplete, inaccurate, or non-existent
- Code duplication and reinvention of the wheel causes bugs and extended project timelines
These issues are addressed by the following features in version 1 of Apex BOOST:
- a logging framework for tracking errors and debug information
- diagnostic (debug, assert) utilities that minimize typing and can be selectively enabled
- a simple and elegant trigger handling framework
- other time-saving utilities for SOQL query management, batch processing, and unit testing
The BOOST
As we considered a name for the library, our thoughts went back to the days of developing desktop applications in C++. Productivity libraries were highly valued and one stood out as exceptional: Boost. Boost has been instrumental in speeding development and increasing code quality in countless C++ products. Boost.org’s answer to “Why should an organization use Boost?” is
In a word, Productivity. Use of high-quality libraries like Boost speeds initial development, results in fewer bugs, reduces reinvention-of-the-wheel, and cuts long-term maintenance costs.
Our Commitment
We’d answer that question about Apex BOOST in the exact same way – we’ve created it with the same goals in mind. Apex BOOST will be an on-going, community-focused project for us. We’ll be soliciting feedback, feature requests, and implementation suggestions in order to make it an extremely useful and easy-to-use tool all of us will benefit from. And finally, Apex BOOST will meet our high quality standards:
- All contributions will be peer reviewed
- 100% unit test coverage & logic testing
- Clean PMD and CPD reports
- Clean Checkmarx Security Analysis
The library is available on AppExchange today! Try it out and let us know what you think!