Today saw the push of the 1.0.0 release of our Seed and Shell apps, along with the 1.0.0 version of our Codeflow library.

Along with a few bug fixes and minor improvements comes the wonderful Codeflow Control Panel. This is an app that get’s bundled with the Codeflow development environment and can be used to interrogate the Salesforce mobile application that you’re building with MobileCaddy. The Codeflow Control Panel can be accessed on http://localhost:3030/codeflow/ and is automatically available after starting your application with mobilecaddy serve.

We should soon have a blog post out explaining more about the Codeflow Control Panel and it’s features.

It should be noted that the 1.0.0 release of the starter applications and the libraries also contain breaking changes if you’re running a Salesforce package of MobileCaddy that has a non mobilecaddy1 namespace. If you are running an old version then please update your package to take advantage of these new and improved assets… just follow this link http://developer.mobilecaddy.net/install/latest-stable.

Full change information can be found in the relevant CHANGELOG files on our github repos.

With the upcoming release of IOS 9 – with a guess date of the 16th September2015 – we’ve been working hard to make sure your Salesforce.com mobile applications powered by MobileCaddy will be fully supportive of the new OS version. We shall be completely transparent and let you know that this hasn’t been plain sailing.

Since testing the earlier betas things have been getting better, but there’s still a couple of breaking changes that mean your apps need to be updated to work as best they can;

Changes requiring an app store submission

NS Exception Domains

The default version of SSL that the OS plays nicely with has been upped. This mean that applications built with the Salesforce Mobile SDK (including the Cordova Plugin) require some extra configuration to allow the app to communicate with the salesforce.com and force.com domains.

A PR we raised has been included in the 3.3.2 version of the Salesforce Mobile SDK Cordova plugin to support the automatic inclusion of this configuration.

Logins are not Persistent

Along with the above issues with oAuth’ing into Salesforce in the first instance it was also seen that once the app was closed (not just resumed from the background) that the user was required to log in again. A bug was raised to the Mobile SDK team and this fix is now in the 3.3.1 version of the IOS repo and in the 3.3.2 version of the Cordova plugin.

Both these breaking changes result in the need for a new IOS app version. If you’re a MobileCaddy customer then these applications have already been built and submitted for you. If you are building your own device apps then you should also specify config to disable BITCODE in xcode. This is needed as the Salesforce Mobile SDK does not yet support BITCODE. This StackOverflow answer guides you through the process.

Changes requiring a new Application Bundle

Along with the need to have a new device application (IPA) available on the iTunes store (or your enterprise counterpart) there are other changes to be aware of if you are using Angular/Ionic for your core application code.

Delay the Bootstrapping of Angular

For some reason (we are still investigating) it seems that some of the digest cycles run into mass loops (this has been put down to a bug in the UIWebView in the latest version of IOS 9 Beta that is available). One result of this appears to be that apps that rely on the manual bootstrapping of Angular can end up hanging. One solution we have found that seems to work is to, albeit a bit dirty, delay the calling of the bootstrapping.

Original Line…

Replace with…

Once your code has had these change applied it is recommended that you deploy to the platform and test on IOS 9 and pre IOS 9 devices. Our experience shows that there is no need to target IOS 9 in this particular case. Using the MobileCaddy Deploy to Salesforce functionality and our Dynamic Versioning it should be possible to target your test users (if you have some) and also dynamically up version your users prior to the IOS 9 release.

Wrap Up

As with prior IOS releases it’s a case of “keep your wits about you” and be prepared as best you can.

And we shall keep you posted on any further findings… though at present it looks like MobileCaddy and even non-MobileCaddy Salesforce mobile application developers should have the fixes they need to have their enterprise apps running.

Last week was a busy one with regards to meet-ups, and it was capped off with a super-whammy gathering of the Ionic UK folk. The theme was to be the ever-progressing suite of tools that make lives for those building with Ionic even easier. As well as attending I was also contacted by one of the organisers – the lovely Sani Yusuf – to see if MobileCaddy wanted to demo our apps and tools. Having been actively improving our tooling recently (see Introducing MobileCaddy CLI 1.0.0) I jumped at the opportunity.

The friendly Makers Academy folk hosted us and the mobile insights tool Count.ly sponsored the beers and pizza, so thanks go to them for getting behind the event.

Before the event kicked off I was chatting to a couple of the most recent graduates from the Maker’s Academy, and they were telling me how they’d built their final projects using Ionic. One was (as I’d describe it) “An Uber for Errands” and the other was an eco-check-in-reward type service, where users could check-in to locations (coffee shops, retail outlets etc) and the place of check-in would donate a small sum to help towards planting trees. I wonder if we’ll ever see either of these come to fruition, I hope so.

But hey, enough of my yakkin’; whaddaya say? Let’s boogie!

Ionic IO – Mike Hartington

With MobileCaddy the Salesforce administrator can decide who get’s which version of the app (for example a set of test users can beta test a new release), and along similar lines Ionic IO allows you to deploy to “channels”, that might represent beta testers, for example.

A closing remark from Asim was that it should be noted that in his experience Ionic IO’s Deploy is still very much an alpha product… but great potential for things to come.

Third Party Tools – Sani Yusuf

As well as the Ionic IO tools there are many 3rd party apps and services that can be used to enhance your Ionic App. Sani gave us a rundown of some of his favourites;

Push

• PushWoosh
  • Good Dashboards
  • Strong segmentation options
  • Geolocation zones
• Urban Airship

Authentication

• Auth0
• Firebase

Analytics

• AppSee
• Count.ly
  • Also do stats

We haven’t really used many 3rd party services at MobileCaddy as most of these functions are built-in, either through our APIs or the sheer fact that we have a Salesforce.com backend. I can see for sure though that having a toolset like Firebase and Count.ly would give you an incredibly cheap and easy leg up to building amazing apps.

Showcase

Next up was an open-floor session. I opened with a quick talk through our MobileCaddy tooling setup. I covered how we match the Ionic IO toolset for mobile apps built with Salesforce (with offline in mind). One thing that struck me when I was writing the talk up was just how similar the architecture for an app built and run with Ionic and Ionic IO would now, compared with how we’ve been doing things at MobileCaddy.

To have a similar architecture introduced with Ionic IO is a great sanity test – Me

A recording of my talk is here;

We then had several groups of indie devs and users come up a share their apps… I LOVED this bit.

Jambusters – A real time traffic monitoring app built for Londoners. With the app you can set routes and times so that you only see the information relevant to you. The app allows you to see live traffic cam statuses and pictures. The chap that built was an old-skool dev, building the backend with Perl, Emacs and sqlite. I can’t find a link to the app unfortunately… but I’m on the hunt for it. The developer is after some cash and users to test it.

HooHair – billed as “the easy way to book your haircut” it’s a stylish location based app to allow online booking of haircuts. The app looks pretty neat, yet still in development. The developers recommended that anyone looking to work with maps in the apps to take a look at MapBox as it has great customisations available.

Sold House Prices – This is a free app that lists the prices that houses were sold at, based on location. The app itself was really only a tool to demonstrate a Google Analytics cordova plugin that can connect to the native Google Universal Analytics SDK. The demo was pretty neat… and showed how users (us in the audience trying out the app) had our interactions recorded. These included search criteria etc, and was pretty cool.

Wrap-up

This was a great meet-up, full of smashing talks and buckets of information. Thanks go to Sani and Ryan for organising and to the sponsors and all the presenters and those willing to share their work in the showcase section. Of course thanks should be extended to everyone involved in Angular and Ionic too… and I hope they already know how much I love them all.

The next meet-up is planned to coincide with Angular Connect… and I’ve been hearing that we might be in for a surprise. I personally can’t wait (especially as I lost everyone on the way out so missed out on post-meetup-beers).

Meetups in London this week have had a rough ride due to the planned Tube strikes… thankfully for me these worked out in my favour and it meant that I was able to get a spot at the London Salesforce Devs meetup at the very last minute.

There was a new venue for this outing of the devs – The Financial Times offices by the Thames. The venue had everything we needed, along with (too many?!?!) pizzas and beer. I was hoping to carb-load for my morning run the next day, and this provided the perfect opportunity.

There were two talks scheduled but we ended up with three… sounding good already, right?

In fact the dev group was honoured to welcome Jodi Wagner and other #girlygeeks to the group. Some who I’ve seen at previous meetups but were in attendance to specifically kick off a new London GirlyGeeks meetup. Jodi pointed out that the meetups won’t be entirely technical, and are all are welcome to attend… more news on this can expected post-Dreamforce.

Anyhoo… onto the talks;

CSS Flexbox – MakePositive

Kim Hellbom who was down for this talk was sadly unwell, but thankfully Mohammed Haseeb from MakePositive filled in with just 30 minutes notice. The talk was a whistle-stop tour of the CSS Flexbox implementation and how it can be used to gain control over some tricky responsive layouts.

Included in the talk were the some of the pitfalls of other layouts techniques and some examples. Here’s a codepen demonstrating Flexbox in use.

See the Pen Flebox example 1 by kim hellbom (@kimhell) on CodePen.

The Flexbox display property is a fairly deep topic… and I recommend this great article on css-tricks for a good overview and as an initial starting point on the subject.

We were teased with the idea of a Minecraft demo… but were left without one… I’ll chase down the folk at MakePositive to see if they have a link to it.

Salesforce at The FT : Gareth Park

Gareth gave bonus talk on how The FT have used Salesforce internally. The FT have 2k+ users, 10 developers and 2 admins and currently use (possibly among others) the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and multiple apps on Force.com. These cover both B2C and B2B scenarios.

One particular case that Gareth took us through was that of their Corporate Fulfilment application. Prior to powering this with Salesforce they had multiple systems on their architecture, which lent itself to complexity and a slow flow between the different systems. This meant that a fairly simple use-case could actually be a complicated process that took many hours.

With a Salesforce solution they used Salesforce as their key platform (so single sign-on for users) and this consumed micro-services hosted on platforms such as Heroku and AWS. These micro-services were bridged via a Kafka messaging queue and bespoke Salesforce event bridge.

The result of this migration was a dramatic reduction in time-to-complete for transactions, as well as a simple, single platform for end users to interact with.

We were also told how splunk was used as a big store, allowing for complex searching, filtering and handling of events.

Building Video Apps on Salesforce – Francesco Iervolino

As a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect Francesco is certainly a voice of knowledge. And in this case he talked us through some of the details of how MakePositive have used video in their Salesforce apps. He mentioned that in today’s world that the technology needed to deliver such functionality was cost-effective and as such enriched apps were now more readily available. A couple of apps that show a real benefit of this technology are TutorHub and BeMyEyes. If you’ve not heard of either of these then I definitely recommend you take a quick gander.

Francesco’s talk and demos used the WebRTC standard technology and he told us that in one of their projects their R&D into this topic came out with several options. The one they settled on though was a solution called OpenTok. There were a few reasons for this choice but a key one was the archiving feature that they needed. OpenTok, who are owned by Telefonica, supplies a comprehensive set of standard features, as well as some extensions that really make their offering fairly strong.

We were then shown a few demonstration apps that Francesco had put together, ranging from a very basic Visualforce implementation, through to a video conference calling app. The hunger in the room for such an app (based upon the quality of Hangouts, the pain of GTM, etc) was huge… and it seems that MakePositive might release this on the AppExchange.

Francesco’s slides can be found here.

Wrap-up

As well as the usual chat (and beer and pizza) with the fellow attendees the key highlight of this month’s meetup was the Video talk. It was confidently delivered and covered a topic that really got people thinking and talking… oh how I’d love to never have to use <INSERT VID CONF TOOL OF YOUR CHOICE> again.

Thanks, of course, must go to the organisers for once again putting on a great meetup. And to to The FT for hosting and feeding us all.

Last night I attended my first JS Monthly meetup in London. The meetup group used to be focused solely on Backbone JS but it’s since diversified. The meetup was organised by Guy Nesher, a London based JS dev, and to say he over-ordered on pizza and beer would be an accurate (and unfamiliar) statement. Thanks should then go to lastminute.com for sponsoring the event, I was left wanting for nothing.

There were two talks on the line-up for the event… so let’s get to the detail.

Charts: from monoliths to components with D3

First up was Colin Eberhardt and Chris Price from Scott Logic, a company I was familiar with from my trips up to DIBI conf. They gave a talk on how charts and charting libraries are huge monoliths, but also how they’ve come up with an approach using D3 that makes use of components to aid maintainability and re-use.

Chris initially talked us through D3’s Data Join feature. This is the way to essentially have data-binding in D3. It was something that very few of the audience, myself included, knew really existed within D3 itself. Chris showed us some example code of how this can be used (using the characters from Under Siege, which was nice), but from the point of learning I recommend reading Mike Bostock’s write-up on this. We have used used D3 in some of the mobile applications we’ve built MobileCaddy, but we’ve not as yet had the need to use joins, though I do look forward getting my hands dirty with it.

Colin then introduced us to making re-usable components using D3, and with this D3FC, a collection of components that Scott Logic have produced that can be extended to help build interactive charts. It sounds very interesting and something definitely worth looking into if you have a need to implement data visualisations within your applications.

My personal experience with D3 is that it can be fairly overwhelming upon first sight… and this talk gave me a better explanation of some real D3 use over much of the online documentation I’ve read. So for that alone I thank Chris and Colin.

ES6 Promises – Guy Nesher

I’ve seen a lot of talks on ES6 features, and I’ve got to say that Promises seem to have taken a back seat in most of them, so to have a talk dedicated on them was a nice change.

Guy’s talk outlined how promises and their syntax can be used to mitigate the chance of creating Christmas Tree code through callback-hell. He also covered the importance of having a catch() clause; promises that reject and aren’t caught can lead to errors falling into the abyss.

If a promise rejects and no one is around to catch it, does it fail?

Using Callbacks;

Using Promises (and fetch);

Guy’s slides are available here.

There was some discussion around debugging in promises and how it can be tricky in error scenarios. This prompted me to make a note of this edition of Google’s Totally Tooling Tops YouTube series.

If you’re using JavaScript Promises then the short vid is well worth viewing.

Wrap Up

It was great meeting Guy and the other attendees; post meetup beers and chats were as good as ever. I seem to say this a lot, but I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing what will be presented at the next meetup.