WebJars has been my hobby project for almost 3 years and thanks to tons of help from the community the project now has almost 900 JavaScript libraries in Maven Central. In February 2015 there were over 500,000 downloads of WebJars! Up until now all of the WebJars have been manually created, deployed, and maintained. Today I’m happy to launch Bower WebJars, an on-demand service that allows users to deploy new WebJars from Bower packages.

Salesforce provides a variety of different ways to integrate external apps into the Salesforce UI. Canvas is an iframe-based approach for loading externally hosted UIs into pages on Salesforce. The nice thing about Canvas versus a plain iframe is that Canvas has a JavaScript bridge which enables secure communication between the external iframe and Salesforce. This communication happens in the context of the Salesforce user and doesn’t require the typical OAuth handshake. Because Canvas apps live outside of Salesforce they can be built with any language and run anywhere, including Heroku.

The typical method of adding JavaScript and CSS libraries (e.g. jQuery, Bootstrap, and AngularJS) to Salesforce environments is to locate a library’s download, download it, then upload it to Salesforce, then figure out the structure of the files so that you can use them from Visualforce. Using WebJars as a basis, I’ve created an easy way to add libraries to Salesforce, called Force WebJars.

Here is a quick demo:

Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

For the past 8 (maybe 9?) years the absolute best yearly conference I’ve attended has been The Java Posse Roundup in Crested Butte, Colorado. At most conferences my favorite parts are the conversations at the bar and writing code with other attendees. The Java Posse Roundup has always been a conference just of those best parts.

Even though The Java Posse is no-more, the Java Posse Roundup will live on as the Winter Tech Forum. I’m sure that many of the same developers will come since it has been a yearly pilgrimage for many. But hopefully the new name helps bring an even more diverse audience this year.

Many developers already have the Node.js toolchain installed on their machines but when I lead workshops there are always a few who don’t. The process of installing Node build toolchains can take quite a bit of time for new users (especially on Windows). To simplify the process of getting the gulp toolchain setup, Bruce Eckel and I created gulp launcher. With a fresh system you can run gulp with only one download and one command:

I’ve been building enterprise Java web apps since servlets were created. In that time the Java ecosystem has changed a lot but sadly many enterprise Java developers are stuck in some very painful and inefficient ways of doing things. In my travels I continue to see Java The Sucky Parts - but it doesn’t have to be that way. It is time for enterprises to move past the sucky ways they are using the Java platform. Here is a list of the suckiest parts of Java that I see most often and some recommendations for how to move past them.

Dreamforce 2014 is quickly approaching and this year is going to be amazing! I’ll be presenting a few sessions and helping at the $1 Million Hackathon. Here are my sessions:

• Integrating Clouds & Humans with the Salesforce Wear Developer Packs

  As smart watches and other human-integrated devices make their way into the mainstream, developers will need to quickly ramp up to these new paradigms and interaction models. Integrating these new wearable devices with Salesforce connects users to their businesses and customers in new ways. Join us as we use code and examples to dive into the architecture and patterns for developing wearable Salesforce apps with the Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Android Wear.

Jekyll is simple static content compiler popularized by GitHub Pages. If you use Jekyll in a GitHub repo a static website will automatically be created for you by running Jekyll on your content sources (e.g. Markdown). That works well but there are cases where it is nice to deploy a Jekyll site on Heroku. After trying (and failing) to follow many of the existing blogs about running Jekyll on Heroku, I cornered my coworker Terence Lee and got some help. Turns out it is pretty simple.

Salesforce.com was initially created as a Sales Force Automation (SFA) / Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application in the cloud but has evolved over the years into a modern platform for all types of enterprise applications. Now the Salesforce name is a legacy artifact of that past. This is like the name Frigidaire which is still the name for a company that now produces much more than Frigidaires (i.e. Refrigerators). The Salesforce1 Platform still provides the SFA & CRM applications but is also a foundation for building modern systems.

This Wednesday (Aug 6, 2014) I will be presenting Building & Deploying Reactive Service Pipelines at the Utah Scala Enthusiasts group in Salt Lake City. Here is the abstract:

Composition of micro-service is a modern integration pattern that couples nicely with Reactive and Continuous Delivery. These paradigms enable small teams to move quickly while integrating cross-silo data stores for modern JavaScript UIs and REST services. This session will use Scala, Play Framework, and Heroku to illustrate how to build and deploy Reactive Service Pipelines.