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Haris Osmanagic, B&H Disadvantages of the Force.com platform
Hi all,
I'm evaluating pros and cons for building an integration with Salesforce on Force.com platform. Since the pros don't need to be commented on, I'll just ask about what some developers consider as cons. I came across this SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664503/disadvantages-of-the-force-com-platform What part of this can you confirm as true, and what not? The question is closed because of the format, but it'd be great if someone could provide concrete answers to it (when you google for disadvantages you get this at the top). I'll copy and paste some of the mentioned disadvantages for easier referencing:
I'm evaluating pros and cons for building an integration with Salesforce on Force.com platform. Since the pros don't need to be commented on, I'll just ask about what some developers consider as cons. I came across this SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664503/disadvantages-of-the-force-com-platform What part of this can you confirm as true, and what not? The question is closed because of the format, but it'd be great if someone could provide concrete answers to it (when you google for disadvantages you get this at the top). I'll copy and paste some of the mentioned disadvantages for easier referencing:
- Apex is a proprietary language. Other than the foce.com Eclipse plugin, there's little to no tooling available such as refactoring, code analysis, etc.
- Apex was modeled on Java 5, which is considered to be lagging behind other languages, and without tooling (see #1), can be quite cumbersome.
- Deployment is still fairly manual with lots of gotchas and manual steps. This situation is slowly improving over time, but you'll be disappointed if you're used to having automated deployments.
- Apex lacks packages/namespaces. All of your classes, interfaces, etc. live in one folder on the server. This makes code much less organized and class/interface names necessarily long to avoid name clashes and to provide context. This is one of my biggest complaints, and I would not freely choose to build on force.com for this reason alone.
- The "force.com IDE", aka force.com eclipse plugin, is incredibly slow. Saving any file, whether it be a class file, text file, etc., usually takes at least 5 seconds and sometimes up to 30 seconds depending on how many objects, data types, class files, etc. are in your org. Saving is also a blocking action, requiring not only compilation, but a full sync of your local project with the server. Orders of magnitude slower than Java or .NET.
- The online developer community does not seem very healthy. I've noticed lots of forum posts go unanswered or unsolved. I think this may have something to do with the forum software salesforce.com uses, which seems to suck pretty hard.
- The data access DSL in Apex leaves a lot to be desired. It's not even remotely competitive with the likes of (N)Hibernate, JPA, etc.
- Developing an app on Apex/VisualForce is an exercise in governor limits engineering. Easily half of programmer time is spent trying to optimize to avoid the numerous governor limits and other gotchas like visualforce view state limits. It could be argued that if you write efficient code to begin with you won't have this problem, which is true to an extent. However there are many times that you have valid reasons to make more than x queries in a session, or loop through more than x records, etc.
- The save->compile->run cycle is extremely slow, esp. when it involves zipping and uploading the entire static resource bundle just to do something like test a minor css or javascript change.
- In general, the pain of a young, fledgling platform without the benefits of it being open source. You have no way to validate and/or fix bugs in the platform. They say to post it to their IdeaExchange. Yeah, good luck with that.
- You can't package up your app and deliver it to users without significant user intervention and configuration on the part of the administrator of the org.
- THERE IS NO DEBUGGER! If you want to debug, it's literally debug by system.debug statements. This is probably the biggest problem I've found
- Even tho the language is java based, it's not java. You can't import any external packages or libraries. Also the base libraries that are available are severely limited so we've found ourselves implementing a bunch of stuff externally and then exposing those bits as services that are called by force.com
- There is no mention anywhere in even the most deep-dark technical references of the common errors, or even the limitations of a given api or feature
The efficiency of having a stable platform and avoiding big performance and stability problems is easily wasted in trying to code around the limits that people refer to. There are so many limits to the platform, it becomes completely maddening. These limits are not high-end limits you'll hit once you have a lot of users, you'll hit them almost right away.
While there are usually techniques to get around them, it's very hard to figure out strategies for avoiding them while you're also trying to develop the business logic of your actual application.
To give you a simple sense of how developer un-friendly the environment is, take the "lack of debugging environment" referred to above. It's worse than that. You can only see up to 20 of the most recent requests to the server in the debug logs. So, as you're developing inside the application you have to create a "New" debug request, select your name, hit "Save", switch back to your app, refresh the page, click back to your debug tab, try to find the request that will house your debug log, hit "find" to search for the text you're looking for. It's like ten clicks to look at a debug output. While it may seem trivial, it's just an example of how little care and consideration has been given to the developer's experience.
Everything about the development platform is a grafted-on afterthought. It's remarkable for what it is, but a total PITA for the most part. If you don't know exactly what you are doing (as in you're certified and have a very intimate understanding of Apex), it will easily take you upwards of 10-20x the amount of time that it would in another environment to do something that seems like it would be ridiculously simple, if you can even succeed at all.
The governor limits are indeed that bad. You have a combination of various limits (database queries, rows returned, "script statements", future calls, callouts, etc.) and you have to know exactly what you are doing to avoid these. For example, if you have a calculated rollup "formula" field on an object and you have a trigger on a child object, it will execute the parent object triggers and count those against your limits. Things like that aren't obvious until you've gone through the painful process of trying and failing.
That is not to mention a whole host of other issues. Packaging isn't what you expect. You can't package up your app and deliver it to users without significant user intervention and configuration on the part of the administrator of the org. The AppExchange is a total joke, and they've even started charging 5K just to get your app listed. Importing with the data loader sucks, especially if you have any triggers. You can't export all of your data in one step that includes your relationships in such a way that it can easily be re-imported into another org in a single step (for example a dev org). You can only refresh a sandbox once a month from production, no exceptions, and you can't include your data in a refresh by default unless you have called your account executive to get that feature unlocked. You can't mass delete data in custom objects. You can't change your package names. Certain things can take numerous days to complete after you have requested them, such as a data backup before you want to deploy an app, with no progress report along the way and not much sense of when exactly the export occurred. Given that there are synchronicity issues of data if there are relationships between the data, there are serious data integrity issues in that there is no such thing as a "transaction" that can export numerous objects in a single step. There are probably some commercial tools to facilitate some of this, but these are not within reach to normal developers who may not have a huge budget.