Simon Fell

The future of SF3

2012-10-25T16:14:12Z

SF3 was one of the first OSX/Salesforce tools I wrote, made possible by an API in OSX called Sync Services. With the release of OSX 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion) Apple officially deprecated the Sync Services API (and its future was in doubt for a quite a while prior to that). With this news the future for SF3 is that it doesn't have any future, there is no new API that replaces the functionality of Sync Services. There are APIs to talk to both Address Book and iCal, but without the sync engine piece an app that wanted to sync data between those apps and a 3rd party is going to have to build the entire sync/match/change log functionality itself, a big job. Its possible that exposing the salesforce data using CalDav and CardDav might make it usable from OSX, but I haven't had time to investigate that in any detail.

Software Engineering metrics

2012-09-07T02:43:02Z

Easy to digest venn diagram explaining everything thats wrong with the typical metrics used in software engineering.

Handling binary http response in apex.

2012-03-03T04:07:37Z

For quite a while now you've been able to make HTTP requests from Apex to other services, this was aimed at integrations for structured data, xml or json, and so would deal with strings. This made life easier if you were actually doing xml or json, but makes life difficult to impossible if you were trying to deal with binary data. In the recent Spring release this is fixed, and you can now work with binary data (blobs in apex) directly in the http request or response. Here's an example of making a HTTP GET request for an image PNG file, and saving it to the document object in salesforce

HttpRequest r = new HttpRequest();
r.setMethod('GET');
r.setEndpoint('http://www.pocketsoap.com/osx/soqlx/soqlxicon.png');
Http http = new Http();
HttpResponse res = http.send(r);
blob image = res.getBodyAsBlob();

Document d = new Document();
d.name = 'logo.png';
d.body = image;
d.folderId = UserInfo.getUserId();
insert d;
system.debug(d.id);

(Yes, this may well be my one blog post for this year)

Hudson/Jenkins plugin for Chatter notifications

2011-02-18T17:08:57Z

Hudson is a popular continuous integration build server, I've been working on a plugin for it that will post build notifications to chatter. The plugin is configurable, so that it can post updates to its own wall, to a specific group (perhaps the project team that owns the build), or to a specific data record (perhaps you have a custom object that represents a build).

You can grab the source and a prebuilt plugin binary from the projects home page on github.

ZKSforce now with iPhone OS support.

2010-06-08T03:40:12Z

ZKSforce is the Cocoa library i wrote to make it easier to access the Salesforce.com API from Cocoa / Objective-C. I just posted a new version that uses the Salesforce.com v19 API, and has switched out its use of NSXML & NSCalendarDate with libxml & NSDate and so is now compatible with both OSX and iPhone based projects. (iPhone OS 3.2 and up should be good).