As most of the developers are now aware of the development best practices to save time and resources with the availability of a wide range of tools, Salesforce DX come out of the box by offering an end-to-end, integrated development environment. It allows fellow developers an opportunity to break free of the legacy trapping of other such platforms and enjoy high yield agile development methodology. Up until recent times, agile was just an upgrade from the norm, but now it becomes the default standard to ensure more productivity, control, and collaboration.
Developer tools in Salesforce DX
Salesforce DX comes with a comprehensive ecosystem, featuring many end-to-end, flexible, and open tools. This ecosystem offers out-of-the-box solutions alongside many of the already familiar tools to facilitate actions like the creation of a new scratch org, new API, and with a powerful fresh command line interface.
Along with these new tools, Salesforce DX also lets the developers build applications with some other favorite tools too including GitHub Selenium, Eclipse, and Sublime etc. The option to integrate environments like Eclipse further enhances the value of this toolset for the developers.
Salesforce advantages
#1 Scratch Org
One most important thing about Salesforce DX is its Scratch org, which is an innovative development environment that facilitates a disposable and source-driven deployment provision of the metadata and core Salesforce code.
The developers working on Salesforce DX now tend to develop their apps and test those using the Developer Edition of Salesforce or Sandbox. As Flosum.com experts point out, Scratch orgs will offer a fair upgrade from such developer environments by making it completely configurable, which further enable the developers to understand and deploy features and preferences of various editions.
#2 Environment hub
The latest Salesforce DX also offers a fresh Environment Hub, which is similar to the Sandboxes list in primary setup; however, it comes with a lot of additional functionality to allow developers or Salesforce admin to track all such orgs. Among these, the org where the Environment Hub gets enabled acts as the central point of management for the other orgs, and the users of the subsidiary orgs get permission to create, manage, and delete the orgs.
Licenses to develop and test the orgs also get linked to the primary environment hub. Salesforce DX offers fresh APIs also for integration of the Scratch Orgs and Environment Hub into the workflow without hassles.
#3 Source driven deployment model
Another handy feature in DX is its source-driven deployment model. Developers can simply plug into the third-party tests and build the automation tools like Heroku Flow or some home-grown solutions to work seamlessly. Heroku is a cloud-based PaaS (platform as a service), which help the developers to develop and deliver applications at a scale without the need for any infrastructural needs.
Above all, Salesforce DX now creatively walks against the traditional methods as like the concept of changesets by totally re-imaging the packaging structure of apps differently. Enterprises and ISV partners can now build artefacts to streamline their customized packaging, deployment, as well as maintenance of software applications built on the Salesforce DX platform.
