#SF-Dreamforce: Getting Started With Visualforce

Speaker: Chris Wall, salesforce.com

Benefits of Visualforce

-- Force.com, built on top of Apex and integrates with Force.com objects

-- Tightly integrated

-- Broad library of ready to serve components

-- Extend with custom components

-- Flexible

Rapid, Extensible, Flexible

-- 1.3 Bill requests/ month

-- Adopted internally

-- Junobaby.com

-- Pages can be created on the fly

-- Wisiwyg directly on page

Demo showed that....um..its pretty robust and intuitive from a creation standpoint.

-- Can use standard controllers to display SF information

Demoed the display of showing SF account info on a customer page with edit capability.

-- Using tests within Apex code is key. 70% of test must pass before acceptance. Provides some analytics.

-- Interface provides logs of apex calls

-- Visualforce pages can render in PDF

-- Wizards can be built

-- Mobile

-- Email Templates

Worst Practices

-- Ignoring standard web best practices, UX is paramount

-- Dump on a page, respect the limits

-- Desregarding viewstate

-- Redundancy

-- Straight to production

Key Take Aways

-- Comprehensive tag-based markup language

-- Controllers provide application logic

-- Charting will become available in '12

#SF-Dreamforce