Part I: Key Concepts for Application Development

Chapter 1, Building and Publishing Your Application, gets your application out to your prospects and customers using packages, AppExchange, and subscriber’s support.

Chapter 2, Leveraging Platform Features, ensures that your application is aligned with the platform features and uses them whenever possible, which is great for productivity when building your application, but—perhaps more importantly—it ensures that your customers are also able to extend and integrate with your application further.

Chapter 3, Application Storage, teaches you how to model your application’s data to make effective use of storage space, which can make a big difference to your customer’s ongoing costs and initial decision making when choosing your application.

Chapter 4, Apex Execution and Separation of Concerns, explains how the platform handles requests and at what point Apex code is invoked. It is important to understand how to design your code for maximum reuse and durability.

Part II: Backend Logic Patterns

Chapter 5, Application Service Layer, focuses on understanding the real heart of your application: how to design it, make it durable, and future proof it around a rapidly evolving platform using Martin Fowler’s Service pattern as a template.

Chapter 6, Application Domain Layer, aligns Apex code typically locked away in Apex Triggers into classes more aligned with the functional purpose and behavior of your objects, using object-orientated programming (OOP) to increase reuse and streamline code and leverage Martin Fowler’s Domain pattern as a template.

Chapter 7, Application Selector Layer, leverages SOQL to make the most out of the query engine, which can make queries complex. Using Martin Fowler’s Mapping pattern as a template, this chapter illustrates a means to encapsulate queries, making them more accessible and reusable, and making their results more predictable and robust across your code base.

Chapter 8, Additional Languages, Compute, and Data Services, explores how to build application backend logic that references the Service layer pattern without using the Apex programming language. This will enable you to use your skills with other languages for application development, which frees you from Apex heap and CPU limits.

Part III: Developing the Frontend

Chapter 9, Building User Interfaces, covers the concerns of an enterprise application user interface with respect to translation, localization, and customization, as well as the pros and cons of the various UI options available in the platform.

Chapter 10, User Interfaces and the Lightning Component Framework, explains the architecture of this modern framework for delivering rich client-device agnostic user experiences, from a basic application through to using component methodology to extend Lightning Experience and Salesforce1 Mobile.

Part IV: Extending, Scaling, and Testing an Application

Chapter 11, Providing Integration and Extensibility, explains how enterprise-scale applications require you to carefully consider integration with existing applications and business needs while looking to the future by designing the application with extensibility in mind.

Chapter 12, Asynchronous Processing and Big Data Volumes, shows that designing an application that processes massive volumes of data, either interactively or asynchronously, requires understanding your customer’s volume requirements and leveraging the latest platform tools and features, such as the query optimizer.

Chapter 13, Unit Testing, explores the differences and benefits of unit testing versus system testing. This aims to help you understand how to apply dependency injection and mocking techniques to write unit tests that cover more code scenarios and run faster. You will also look at leveraging practical examples of using the Apex Stub API with the ApexMocks open source library and testing client logic with the Jest open source library.

Chapter 14, Source Control and Continuous Integration, shows that maintaining a consistent code base across applications of scale requires careful consideration of source control and a planned approach to integration as the application is developed and implemented.

Chapter 15, Integrating with External Services, explores how you and your customers can extend your application securely with services and data hosted outside of the Salesforce Platform, using both code and configuration tools such as Flow.

Chapter 16, Adding AI with Einstein, explores services and features provided by Salesforce in order for you and your customers to add AI and machine learning capabilities to your application and its data.