West London Salesforce1 Meetup – Jan 2015

Peter Chittum – Salesforce Lightning

Peter was up first; his talk was based on two of the Lightning products, Lightning Components and the Lightning App Builder. As per usual with a Salesforce talk the Safe Harbour slide was then presented and with this in mind informed that the Lightning App builder should be in GA in the Summer ’15 release. It’s currently in pilot so is available to use if you ask your account contact.

Lightning Components

Peter covered a few of the basic points, how SF1 was built using Lightning, how Aura is the open source basis of lightning, etc. We’ve written about these before, so I won’t go into details again. One thing that was mentioned over again though, and I think was the big take-away from this part of the session, was the Event Driven approach of Lightning and how this enables different components to interact with each other, through subscription and firing. Components could be one of three types, and interaction between them all is available and this is the grounding for a component based framework like Lightning. The component types are;

• Standard – Out of the box from Salesforce
• Custom – Written by you and your teams
• AppExchange – Written by third parties and available through the (coming soon) ComponentExchange

Peter then showed us a quick demo based upon the Lightning Quick Start tutorial, but he also added an external component in. He used a FileUpload component (written by Peter Knolle and available on github) and demonstrated how the component could be plugged into his app. There’s further info on the component on Peter Knolles blog.

Further info on on what’s available in Spring ’15 and how to use it can be found in the Spring ’15 Lightning Component Dev Guide.

One final note on components is that within a component, developers can include fully fledged documentation, including code examples, specs etc. This, if pushed correctly, could be a big winner for devs everywhere.

Lightning App Builder

Peter then showed us a quick demo of the Lightning App builder. If you’re not familiar with the App Builder then you could do worse than watch this demo vid.

Peter’s demo showed us that with some boiler plate code Peter Knolles’ FileUpload component could be made available in the App Builder palette. It was a brief demo, but I suppose if something has been made quite simple then it lends itself to being quicker than you might expect.

I’m still not personally sure how much the App Builder will take off among the more hardcore devs, but who knows, I might be pleasantly surprised (I’ve not yet used it myself).

Justin Halfpenny – Delivering Enterprise Mobility

Our CEO Justin was up next discussing Enterprise mobility. The Who, Why and How of delivering what has become standard for consumer mobile applications.

Justin told us how, inside our organisations, more people are mobile than we think. Just because they’re onsite it does not mean that they’re sitting at their desk. As for Why? there are many answers. Not just increased productivity, but also improved customer service and decreased cost of business. All this lends itself to better business… for yourselves and for your customers. We also need to be aware of the rate of change in technology; A lot of people are now walking around with devices that have many sensors and capabilities. Who knows what will be available on them next year, and the year after.

The How? of course is where MobileCaddy comes in.