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SFEley Is Force.com right for this application?
Hi all,
I've just begun development on an e-commerce (read: "online shopping cart") system for a client, who's attended some Salesforce.com presentations and is now excited about the idea of developing and selling it as a native Force.com application written in Apex. I've done enough basic research to determine that this should be possible: it looks like one can use Apex to build an outward-facing site, that we could use the Customer Portal functionality to enable outside logins to place shopping cart orders, etc. (Am I correct that that's what it's for?)
I'm still looking at language features and will be doing some fast prototyping over the next couple of days to see what the development process is really like, but in the meantime I have a few questions about use and licensing:
1.) The client's needs include having a number of users on the back end with different roles. Order fulfillment in the warehouse, billing, accounting, customer service, etc. I'm a bit confused by Force.com's licensing; would every employee using this system on the back end be required to pay a $50/month license fee? Or would we only need one license for the application or admin user and could define other user types in code?
2.) Does the Force.com platform hosting have sufficient speed to handle "shopping cart" style searches and transactions without making an outside customer wait for response? The client is sensitive to application speed, and it's tougher to benchmark "real life" interactions like this in a simple prototype.
3.) Are the search capabilities within Force.com relatively robust and flexible? My initial design for this application was going to be a Ruby for Rails application, and included full-text search using Ferret (a Lucene-like search engine in Ruby). Is Lucene or a similarly featured search engine available for Apex?
4.) The ability to easily customize the application is important to our requirements. Does VisualForce support relatively simple templating that's accessible to users without having to know much programming?
5.) What tools are currently available for test-driven design and continuous integration? Is anything like JUnit supported within Apex right now?
6.) Has anyone else tried building a major outward-facing (i.e. not intranet) application like this completely within Force.com? Is there anything I should watch out for or any caveats I haven't thought to ask about yet? Anything that makes it really simple or advantageous?
Many thanks in advance for any information and experiences.
I've just begun development on an e-commerce (read: "online shopping cart") system for a client, who's attended some Salesforce.com presentations and is now excited about the idea of developing and selling it as a native Force.com application written in Apex. I've done enough basic research to determine that this should be possible: it looks like one can use Apex to build an outward-facing site, that we could use the Customer Portal functionality to enable outside logins to place shopping cart orders, etc. (Am I correct that that's what it's for?)
I'm still looking at language features and will be doing some fast prototyping over the next couple of days to see what the development process is really like, but in the meantime I have a few questions about use and licensing:
1.) The client's needs include having a number of users on the back end with different roles. Order fulfillment in the warehouse, billing, accounting, customer service, etc. I'm a bit confused by Force.com's licensing; would every employee using this system on the back end be required to pay a $50/month license fee? Or would we only need one license for the application or admin user and could define other user types in code?
2.) Does the Force.com platform hosting have sufficient speed to handle "shopping cart" style searches and transactions without making an outside customer wait for response? The client is sensitive to application speed, and it's tougher to benchmark "real life" interactions like this in a simple prototype.
3.) Are the search capabilities within Force.com relatively robust and flexible? My initial design for this application was going to be a Ruby for Rails application, and included full-text search using Ferret (a Lucene-like search engine in Ruby). Is Lucene or a similarly featured search engine available for Apex?
4.) The ability to easily customize the application is important to our requirements. Does VisualForce support relatively simple templating that's accessible to users without having to know much programming?
5.) What tools are currently available for test-driven design and continuous integration? Is anything like JUnit supported within Apex right now?
6.) Has anyone else tried building a major outward-facing (i.e. not intranet) application like this completely within Force.com? Is there anything I should watch out for or any caveats I haven't thought to ask about yet? Anything that makes it really simple or advantageous?
Many thanks in advance for any information and experiences.
Generally the terms of the contract call for every employee that uses the system to have a license of his own. Remember too that your API rate is limited according to the number and type of user licenses you have, so if you expect to be making lots of web services calls, you'll probably want more licenses to afford yourself a higher limit. The customer portal's licensing may pose an interesting challenge to you since it too currently has a user-based licensing model; you or your client will want to talk to your Salesforce account executive about that.
2.) Does the Force.com platform hosting have sufficient speed to handle "shopping cart" style searches and transactions without making an outside customer wait for response? The client is sensitive to application speed, and it's tougher to benchmark "real life" interactions like this in a simple prototype.
Likely yes, although the limiting factor may be the throughput of your own application to the Apex API (in the event that you choose not to use Visualforce).
3.) Are the search capabilities within Force.com relatively robust and flexible? My initial design for this application was going to be a Ruby for Rails application, and included full-text search using Ferret (a Lucene-like search engine in Ruby). Is Lucene or a similarly featured search engine available for Apex?
Force.com uses a keyword search algorithm based on Lucene.
4.) The ability to easily customize the application is important to our requirements. Does VisualForce support relatively simple templating that's accessible to users without having to know much programming?
At the moment Visualforce is primarily a code-based interface, although you can create reusable Visualforce components.
5.) What tools are currently available for test-driven design and continuous integration? Is anything like JUnit supported within Apex right now?
Apex does have a built-in test mechanism, and you can run tests JUnit-style using the Force.com IDE.
6.) Has anyone else tried building a major outward-facing (i.e. not intranet) application like this completely within Force.com? Is there anything I should watch out for or any caveats I haven't thought to ask about yet? Anything that makes it really simple or advantageous?
Some have, most are authenticated and not publicly accessible, but there is mystarbucksidea.com.
Message Edited by werewolf on 04-14-2008 03:00 PM