Greater innovation and faster collaboration is the motto of new Salesforce DX, which consists of a grand set of tools for the developer to improve their efficiency in terms of application development lifecycle. Salesforce DX addresses many of the current big challenges to developers, and allows them to better manage the process. With a lot of open access tools, org developmental teams also can work easily with CLIs (Command Line Interfaces) or IDEs (Integrated Development Environments).
Nowadays, developers working on Salesforce use sandboxes to create their test changes. This may cause issues related to the moving the source of truth, which may not be in the corresponding sandbox. This is also addressed by Salesforce DX, which puts forth a new method of defining the source of truth by using a central source control system, which is called a source-driven development approach.
Even though this new development environment doesn’t fully eliminate all conflicts, it addresses many of the major challenges in development by moving to a source control system in order to make the process much more efficient. The source-driven approach allows the developers to have greater visibility to the current versions and previous.
Salesforce DX features
Salesforce DX also has many additional features to ease up the releases and the orgs. These are known as unlocked packages, which offer a traceable and replicable mode of managing the org changes. For both independent developers and corporate development teams under Flosum.com, Salesforce DX will offer a range of tools to work more effectively.
Another feature is agile development, which is supported by Salesforce DX under the top in class CLI (command line interface), IDE (integrated development environment), or even basic text editors etc. The design methodologies are flexible and open, even then offering continuous integration and ongoing delivery. All in all, Salesforce DX offers a brand-new way to the developers to create apps with better control and flexibility over the entire lifecycle.
Salesforce DX Lifecycle development Tools
As we can understand from above, Salesforce DX is designed to enhance productivity by providing an environment which lets the developers work more collaboratively on them by staying within Salesforce SX platform. It is also an open environment which makes the process easier by letting developer maintain the focus on quality assurance and allow predictability in a standardized lifecycle. Allowing the developers to build continuously and delivery simultaneously, Salesforce SX is also described as best of Heroku and Force.com developer experience.
Salesforce offers many developer tools like Dev Hub, Scratch Org, Managed Packaging, SFDX CLI etc. However, there is no restriction as to using the in-built Salesforce DX tools, but it gives developers the freedom to choose and use whichever tools they like. It can be any text editor they love to work on in combination with the Salesforce CLI or other useful Salesforce Extensions for the Visual Studio Code. Users also have the authority to choose which VCS they want to use for the projects. While using the Salesforce Extensions for the Visual Studio code, there are many extensions also available to develop using Salesforce DX.
