Protection against unwanted data sharing, in-browser inspection and a command line code-review plug-in are among the features Salesforce plans to debut today at its first-ever developers’ conference, TrailheaDX.
Salesforce said it also plans today to announce a $50 million fund to support individuals and companies building apps and components using Lightning, Salesforce’s system for developing enterprise apps. The company plans by year-end to open a Bay Area incubator to provide office space and assistance.
About 2,500 people are expected to attend the two-day event in San Francisco, with 130 viewing “parties” in 24 other countries, said Dylan Steele, a senior director of Salesforce’s App Cloud developers’ program.
“There is a massive demand in the marketplace for professional Salesforce developers, and we will be addressing them at TrailheaDX, but there are also a lot of businesspeople who are building Salesforce apps,” Steele said. “We are bringing all those people together, to exchange technical information and to provide a cultural indoctrination.”
He said a growing number of IT departments are harnessing the skills of both professional coders and businesspeople who are technically inclined but not formally trained — so-called high coder and low coders — and blending them into a single unit.
More than 2.8 million people have built more than 5.5 million applications that run on top of the Salesforce CRM product, Steele said. These apps, some available for purchase in the AppExchange store, customize Salesforce for use in particular industries or businesses. Non-techies can use Lightning, a point-and-click development environment debuted last year, to build both logic and interface components, he said.
Among Lightning’s new features:
- LockerService, which ensures that components to be assembled into an app do not share data with each other unless the developer authorizes them to. When components come from a variety of sources — some home-made, some from third parties — this kind of protection is important, Steele said.
- Inspector, which plugs into the Chrome browser and allows performance-testing and debugging an app before it’s released. Though it works only with Chrome, “probably the apps it tests will run well in other browsers,” he said.
- CLI, a plug-in that allows code review from the command line preferred by expert coders.
The new features are part of company’s 50th upgrade to its software as a service. Those upgrades occur three times a year.
Also set for announcement today are Superbadges, credentials that reflect that a recipient has followed a guided learning path and achieved proficiency in a certain area, such as security or building dashboards. Since its launch in 2014, Salesforce’s Trailhead online-learning site has issued more than 735,000 conventional badges, each indicating proficiency at a more discrete challenge.
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