Apex Design Patterns

Jitendra Zaa, Anshul Verma

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781782173656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Web Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Harness the power of Apex design patterns to build robust and scalable code architectures on the Force.com platform

About This Book

• Apply Creational, Structural and behavioural patterns in Apex to fix governor limit issues.
• Have a grasp of the anti patterns to be taken care in Apex which could have adverse effect on the application.
• The authors, Jitendra Zaa is a salesforce MVP and Anshul Verma has 12+ years of experience in the area of application development.

Who This Book Is For

If you are a competent developer with working knowledge of Apex, and now want to deep dive into the world of Apex design patterns to optimize the application performance, then this book is for you. Prior knowledge of Salesforce and Force.com platform is recommended.

What You Will Learn

• Apply OOPs principal in Apex to design a robust and efficient solution to address various facets to a business problem
• Get to grips with the benefits and applicability of using different design patterns in Apex
• Solve problems while instantiating, structuring and giving dynamic behavior to Apex classes
• Understand the implementation of creational, structural, behavioral, concurrency and anti-patterns in your application
• Follow the Apex best practices to resolve governor limit issues
• Get clued up about the Inheritance, abstract classes, polymorphism in Apex to deal with the object mechanism
• Master various design patterns and determine the best out of them
• Explore the anti patterns that could not be applied to Apex and their appropriate solutions

In Detail

Apex is an on-demand programming language providing a complete set of features for building business applications – including data models and objects to manage data. Apex being a proprietor programming language from Salesforce to be worked with multi tenant environment is a lot different than traditional OOPs languages like Java and C#. It acts as a workflow engine for managing collaboration of the data between users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions, and a SOAP API for programmatic access and integration.

Apex Design Patterns gives you an insight to several problematic situations that can arise while developing on Force.com platform and the usage of Design patterns to solve them. Packed with real life examples, it gives you a walkthrough from learning design patterns that Apex can offer us, to implementing the appropriate ones in your own application. Furthermore, we learn about the creational patterns that deal with object creation mechanism and structural patterns that helps to identify the relationship between entities. Also, the behavioural and concurrency patterns are put forward explaining the communication between objects and multi-threaded programming paradigm respectively. We later on, deal with the issues regarding structuring of classes, instantiating or how to give a dynamic behaviour at a runtime, with the help of anti-patterns. We learn the basic OOPs principal in polymorphic and modular way to enhance its capability. Also, best practices of writing Apex code are explained to differentiate between the implementation of appropriate patterns. This book will also explain some unique patterns that could be applied to get around governor limits.

By the end of this book, you will be a maestro in developing your applications on Force.com for Salesforce

Style and approach

This book is a step-by-step guide, complete with well-tested programs and real world situations to solve your common occurring problems in Apex design by using the anti-patterns. It gets crackling from exploring every appropriate solution to comparing the best one as per OOps principal.

Apex Design Patterns

---

Apex Design Patterns

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: April 2016

Production reference: 1220416

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78217-365-6

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Authors Jitendra Zaa Anshul Verma	Copy Editor Rashmi Sawant
Reviewer John M. Daniel	Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi
Commissioning Editor Julian Ursell	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Nadeem Bagban	Indexer Priya Sane
Content Development Editor Aishwarya Pandere	Production Coordinator Shantanu N. Zagade
Technical Editor Madhunikita Sunil Chindarkar	Cover Work Shantanu N. Zagade

About the Authors

Anshul Verma has been working on the Salesforce platform since 2006. Prior to that, he has done extensive development using MS technologies on web, desktop, and mobile applications. He possesses a tremendous understanding of enterprise-scale systems and has worked in designing intricate systems with high scalability, performance, and robustness. He has been a Dreamforce speaker and is a regular contributor to Stack Exchange and other developer communities. He has four Salesforce certifications and is currently working as a project manager and technical architect where he is responsible for managing customer success and delivering high-quality solutions to his clients. He has conducted various training sessions in his current organization and trained over 50 new hires. He is very popular with his training batches and can be often found sharing his knowledge with his team and peers. He owns and maintains his blog (http://mightycoder.blogspot.com/), and you can follow him on Twitter at @toanshulverma.

Jitendra Zaa has been working on the Salesforce platform since 2008. He has extensively worked on Java and .NET-based enterprise applications. He also has experience in working with multiple JavaScript libraries, web frameworks, ETL tools, and databases. He is an expert in designing and implementing integrations of Salesforce with external systems. He is a regular speaker at the world’s biggest developer event, Dreamforce, mostly in developer track. Because of his contributions to the Salesforce community, he has also been awarded the Salesforce MVP title. He has more than eight Salesforce certifications and works as a Salesforce technical architect. He owns one of the most viewed Salesforce developer blogs (http://www.JitendraZaa.com), formerly, http://Shivasoft.in. You can follow him on Twitter at @JitendraZaa.

About the Reviewer

John M. Daniel has been working in the technology sector for over 20+ years. During that time, he has worked with a variety of technologies and project roles. Currently, he works at FinancialForce.com with their Consulting/Product Services teams. He currently holds multiple certifications from Salesforce.com, including the Platform Developer I and II certifications and the Advanced Developer certification. He is currently in the process of attaining the Certified Technical Architect certification. He loves to spend time with his family, swim at the beach, and work on various open source projects, such as ApexDocs and ApexUML. He co-leads his local area Salesforce Developers User Group and can be found on Twitter at @ImJohnMDaniel.

John has been a technical reviewer for Force.com Enterprise Architecture, by Andrew Fawcett and Learning Apex Programming, by Matt Kaufman and Michael Wicherski, both by Packt Publishing.

I would like to thank my wife, Allison, for always giving me the freedom to pursue my interests.

www.PacktPub.com

For support files and downloads related to your book, please visit www.PacktPub.com.

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at <[email protected]> for more details.

At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

https://www2.packtpub.com/books/subscription/packtlib

Do you need instant solutions to your IT questions? PacktLib is Packt's online digital book library. Here, you can search, access, and read Packt's entire library of books.

Why subscribe?

• Fully searchable across every book published by Packt
• Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content
• On demand and accessible via a web browser

Free access for Packt account holders

Get notified! Find out when new books are published by following @PacktEnterprise on Twitter or the Packt Enterprise Facebook page.

Preface

It was spring 2015; we were both discussing our presentation for Dreamforce 2015. During the discussion, we stumbled on the topic of the usage of design patterns in Apex. We observed that design patterns are still not extensively used in the Apex programming arena. We think that a few prominent factors for this situation are that there are not enough resources available around the design pattern implementation in Apex. Secondly, most of the Apex programmers who started their development career with Force.com have less exposure to other development platforms. Thirdly, some of the design patterns simply do not apply to Force.com development platforms.

As per our observation, the usage and mention of design patterns in day-to-day programming is reduced in Apex as compared to other development platforms. Developers coming from other programming backgrounds mostly have a working experience with design patterns and it's implicit for them to use it in their code style and design.

We realized that it would be even better to develop content around the design pattern implementation in a language that Apex developers can easily relate to. We positively think that by providing scenarios that are specific to Apex development use cases, developers will be able to understand and implement the design patterns in Apex with ease.

To ensure that we are able to provide information uniformly to all Apex developers irrespective of their experience level, this book also includes general programming best practices, programming principles, OOP concepts, and the usual pitfalls at appropriate places.

In line with our past experience with design pattern learning and implementation is the problem of memorizing the design patterns and situations where they fit in. However, in this book, we took real-life scenarios to explain a situation where an appropriate design pattern will be applied. One ca...

Table of contents

• Apex Design Patterns