My first international event I was quite nervous but when I finally arrived at excel I was overwhelmed with salesforce. It was big, better it was massive I was impressed. The first talk I followed was about site.com and HP publishing a number of sites from site.com the numbers were impressive but I’m not a marketing guy so I’ll skip this one. The next presentation was the event kickoff, this was big!

Kickoff presentation

The whole look and feel of this presentation was breathtaking. The crowd, the screens the location everything was so big and impressive. It was a good presentation and it was great to see so many guest speakers telling about their successful Salesforce implementations.

Community common sessions

Using Javascript remoting and MVC Frameworks to build beautiful apps on force.com

This was the first community common presentation of the day, i was early so got a good seat on the leather couch. The ambiance was very nice and intimate. Wes Nolte (@wesnolte) did this talk and it was very nice. I have some experience with the backbone framework and i was glad he mentioned it in his presentation. Among backbone.js and spline he mentioned knockout.js, with this javascript MVC framework he created the “todo hello world” application.

After the framework introduction the pleasantries were over and we dove right in the code. He started off with a simple example of knockout.js with some html. Pretty basic, and with this knowledge he build a simple “hello world todo app”. In just +- 150 lines of code the todo app was done. It was pretty nice but “standard” in the javascript MVC community. After the demo he showed us the same todo application in an existing force.com development org. Now we are talking! He converted javascript objects to force.com objects and vice versa! It was working pretty good and the code was very clean too!

I really liked this presentation you can check out his presentation and code repository at github

Forcedotcom Rookie

The second community common talk I attended was quite an inspiring talk by Keir Bowden. It answered a lot of questions I had running around in my head. He told us about his journey from Force.com rookie to certified technical architect which is the final destination in the force.com developer certification. One of the answers I shared with the crowd was the separation between declarative and programmatic customizations in the dev 401 and dev 501 exams. Me, having a background in Ruby, thought it was essential to know apex script and visualforce for the 401 exam but this was not the case.

He recommended that before taking the 501 exam you should have hands on experience with apex and visualforce. Make sure you are on projects where you can hone your skills accordingly, and help other people out on the developer forums. For the dev 501 exam you’ll get questions involving quite some code that needs debugging or proper testing. Helping people out in the developer forums will sharpen your skills and will make this an easy task! After you’ve done all this, work your way through the salesforce advanced developer books and assignments.

Now you can take a try at the 501 developer exam!

Real Life Ruby app for Salesforce

Vincent Spehner (@vzmind) from Tquilla gave a talk about ruby apps for salesforce with a real-world example. I was really looking forward to this talk because of my experience with ruby, finally seeing it in action got me really excited! It was a good talk about the ruby community and some nice examples of the ruby community accepting the force.com platform as an “ally”. There are several ruby gems available for integration with the force.com platform.

databasedotcom gem:

databasedotcom-rails gem:

The app he presented was Formstorm a pretty slick and amazing app, i suggest you check it out at http://www.formstorm.co! He showed us some pitfalls and a couple of problems you could run into when building ruby apps for the force.com platform

Advanced Testing Techniques on the force.com platform

There also was an amazing talk by Paul Battisson (@pbattisson)!  He showed the audience some great examples and gave a good explanation.This was a mandatory keynote for every developer at Cloudforce in my opinion so shame on you if you weren’t there! Paul has created a couple of awesome test classes and he made them available for free! Go check them out on github!

Presentation can be found here

Testing classes can be found here

All I can say is that I had a blast at cloudstock Londen. It was big, amazing and overwhelming. The best presentations in my opinion where the community common sessions! If you’ve missed cloudstock London make sure you visit next time!