Last week I attended a meeting at Salesforce headquarters and was asked if I was going to be a keynote speaker for Dreamforce '08. I was expressed that I had not been asked like I was last year and had not submitted anything as of yet.

Honestly I do not have any topics that I can really talk about at this point, but wanted to get some feedback from other members here to see if you may have some ideas or topics that you may want to have covered. Now this is not something that I am asking so I can submit your idea and get a free pass to the Dreamforce conference. I just want to know what you may want to listen too, what you find interesting


The Salesforce Dreamforce conference is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from November 2, 2008 through November 5, 2008.

You can register at Salesforce.com

Please do stop by and let me know what you think and what you want as topics. I bet I can get Nick Tran to look at this post to get some ideas of what we would like to hear as a PHP community.

I hope to see some of you there that I have been talking too here and on the salesforce php forums. It would be a pleasure to meet all of you


Thanks

~Mike

I think a great topic would be a detailed explanation on setting up a PHP server to act as your endpoint for handling workflow outbound message requests.

- Recommendations on server setup and the framework of PHP functions that should exist on the server before starting to write individual logic (e.g. that XML parser you like, error handling, etc.

- How to setup an endpoint to handle a specific task (e.g. Opportunity Updated).

- Recommendations on using Outbound Messages (including a session ID or not, ensuring no messages go unhandled, what if the PHP server goes down, etc.)

- Limitations

That would be a great topic!! I sent an email to Nick to keep up with this and see what he thinks.

I know that he is busy, maybe I can send him a summary of this thread once it gets going more.

I like your idea, shoot you could talk about that now, i am sure you have done more with the outbound messaging than I ahve at this point

I'm actually attending the dreamforce conference in SF and very excited to go. Some items I would like to learn more about are:

1) all the features of the SforceBaseClient.php

2) how the SforceBaseClient.php works i.e. how to connect to salesforce with php

3) how to query salesforce through SforceBaseClient.php for more than 30 seconds

4) how to find out the structure of saleforce contacts/leads as a db

5) how to integrate SforceBaseClient.php in a company website

6) any good php tricks that you have

If I think of any more I'll sure post them.

Thanks,
Andrew

Those are all good points Andrew, I like them

A lot of those you can get right here and I would be more than willing to help you with that, or Scott is a GREAT developer

~Mike

I think the whole area of packaging is very important, and very broken. I know that a whole new packaging architecture is coming soon, but now when.

In the past 3 weeks, I have had "internal system errors" - the SF equivalent of the Blue Screen of death several times, all repeatable, all with the packaging process. There have been at least three slip-streamed releases that have fixed it so far.

But managed packages are a real pain to deal with. The Force.com IDE is good for one-of installations, but not much more.

Also, a discussion of what is needed in the force.com IDE. It is good for moving packages around, but I still most of my development right in salesforce.com. Am I doing something wrong?

I want a force.com IDE instruction period for a real user, not just a quick and dirty demo.

Also, a discussion of best practices for Apex code testing.

I believe that I stated I sent an email to Nick Tran and was waiting on his response to see what topics would be covered during this year's PHP Session. Well I am here to deliver some bad news. Here is Nick's response:

I am not sure what to think about this, but I will fill in my feelings tomorrow on this response

~Mike

When I first received the email from Nick, I did not know what to think about that there would not be a PHP session.

Now that I think about it the turn that Salesforce has taken on their APEX code and Visualforce pages, I can see a change in Salesforce's development future. They are really trying to push that everything can be done on their platform and that their clients do not need to process anything on their own servers or applications. I do not agree with this and why am I concerned? I feel that Salesforce is stepping away from open source development. Not many posts have been made on the Salesforce PHP forums by any of the employees in many months, except SimonF.

Nick's last post was in April, I know that he is busy, but he is the lead contact dealing with the PHP toolkit. I am worried that future API changes will not be made or added to the toolkit in the future. I am going to ask Nick about this to try and get a straight answer.

The push to use APEX coding and Visualforce has forced some companies to change their philosophy on future application development in Salesforce. My company is leaning this way, which causes me to have to learn APEX and Visualforce. Now am I upset by that, not at all! I am fortunate enough that I will be able to attend a $ 4000.00, 40 hour instruction class in Atlanta from September 29th to October 4th. Not everyone will have this chance and will have to either teach themselves APEX/Visualforce or higher a contractor to develop their applications within Salesforce.

We need to stick together as PHP developers that are using Salesforce's API and push them to continue the upkeep of the toolkit with changes as their API changes. This will cause problems in the future and will turn away PHP developers from working with Salesforce in the future.

It seems clear that SFDC has never really stepped up to the plate and taken ownership of the toolkits. They treated AJAX pretty shabbily given a year plus long beta cycle, and then a production version that now seems obsolete given VF.

PHP has always been Nicks sort of pet project, Ruby never really got strong, Java is still back on Axis 1.2 last I looked, etc.

I think the hope was always that the user community would take over and they could retreat to the SOAP api as their one interface.

So, I don't know what's coming at Dreamforce in a few weeks, however I'd be really surprised if that direction changed in any big way. I was surprised that Nick is releasing an update, let's hope they pick some languages and commit to staying up to date with them.

Meanwhile, nice forums! Thanks, Steve.

Thanks Steve for the comments and I agree with some of your points.

I am glad that Nick has taken the lead and not let the ToolKit to get thrown into a closet.

I do not agree with some of the direction that Salesforce is going in. I say that because they are really pushing their platform. While I understand that this is a business direction, it really hampers the individual efforts of developers that do not want to use their internal code for projects.

They really cater to .Net and Java in all their examples in the API documentation and it really does not help any other developers that work with other languages.

That is the main reason I started this site, to help others and get help and ideas from other developers that find something that works and share it with this small community