Interview with Force.com Succinctly Author Ed Freitas

The following is a short interview with Succinctly series author Ed Freitas, whose latest book, Force.com Succinctly, was published recently. You can download the book here. 

Force.com Succinctly

What should people know about the subject of your book? Why is it important?

With Force.com, almost anyone can turn business ideas into smart apps—without much code at all—running on one of the world’s most trusted cloud platforms: Salesforce. Every app is instantly mobile, connected, and secure. It matters and it is important because the entry barrier is very low and apps can be created quite easily. 

When did you first become interested in this subject?

I became interested in this subject when I was using Salesforce as a user and found out that it was possible to extend the functionality of the platform by creating custom objects and views (from those objects) with a few clicks and barely any code. 

By writing this e-book, did you learn anything new yourself?

Yes, quite a lot in fact! Before the book I was a “normal” Salesforce user. I started to explore how to use Force.com to add extra functionality to my Salesforce apps. I suddenly discovered a whole new world of possibilities which I never thought were possible. What impressed me the most was the fact that almost no coding was required for things like custom form validations.

Ed Freitas

How will this subject change over the next few years?

I think it will continue to evolve and become even more easy to use, given the depth and reach of Salesforce as a platform. It will continue to gain more interest, especially among business users that want to develop customized solutions which would take a lot of time using a traditional development approach. 

Do you see the subject as part of a larger trend in software development?

Yes, there is a larger trend in software development to make things simpler, for both users and developers, even though we are seeing opposite trends with some JavaScript frameworks (which require a lot of tooling to get a simple application running). Force.com is leading the pack to some extent in making development easier. To make an analogy, it’s like what MS Access would have looked like if it would have evolved into a multi-tenant hosted service.

What other books or resources on this topic do you recommend?

From my experience investigating this topic, I found that the best resource for anything to do with Force.com was their own technical documentation website, especially their Trail Heads section. Most of the already existing books were either too “broad” or too “advanced” to begin with, so I think Force.com Succinctly comes in nicely to fill this gap.