How would you like to create a small Sandbox for your applications written in PHP to test prior to launching them live in a production environment!


If you run a small company or are a consultant who develops php applications which work with the Salesforce API, setting up a development instance can be a pain. Some of the objects in my company's organization have over 40 custom fields. I am fortunate to have a sandbox (development area) so I can test all my scripts, applications, and other development work against our sandbox. The price of a Salesforce Sandbox development area is extremely costly, in neighborhood of $ 5000.00 a month.


In some cases I have manually created one of the objects in my developers instance and it really took a long time due to the number of fields. Nick Tran included the metadata API to the new PHPToolKit that gives you the ability to create custom objects and custom fields using PHP.


I am in the process of building an application for developers that work with PHP and the API that will loop through all the objects in a production organization and then created them in another designated organization. I firmly believe that this application will help developers create test areas in their development instance much faster and speed up your own applications.


I have no time table on when I will release this, but I am going to try and have a Beta version our by the end of this week.


~Mike

Already I have an update. I am able to create the Custom Objects from my Production organization to my developers Org. Next up is the fields!!