Salesforce DX is a 180-degree shift in the future of software development on the Salesforce platform. While it may be nerve–racking for some, rest assured, it's a very exciting aspect of the ever-changing software development landscape. Salesforce DX is almost, but not quite a magic bullet-- here to bring software development in Salesforce to a new level. It offers an improved set of tools to completely change the way we develop custom software on Salesforce. The new features are extremely powerful and effective in fast-paced, reliable, and repeatable Software Development Life Cycles. DX turns the Salesforce propeller plane into a rocket ship. If you're a Salesforce Developer or Admin, you just might rev your engine and launch with these new tools.
The new features that Salesforce DX offers makes development much easier. One of the benefits is efficiency and agility. A production or business org can be turned into a development hub that can in turn, be used to create scratch orgs. Scratch Orgs for development can be created or discarded as needed for different development and testing scenarios. The possibilities are endless!
Packaging 2 is DX’s take on futuristic packaging concepts in Salesforce. Packaging 2 manages metadata for an org as a single unit to facilitate seamless deployment. It also allows enterprises to have a well-defined deployment process that can be repeated across project teams. The functionalities can be distributed to all Salesforce orgs as a “baseline” to bootstrap new projects, which leads to faster development and reduced project timelines.
New command line tools were also added as the backbone of DX. Built on the highly successful Heroku CLI, they are essential for automation. With DX, it's also possible to build hybrid applications that live partly in Salesforce and partly in Heroku. This aspect of Salesforce DX ensures a solid foundation for user-friendly integrated development environments. The command-line tools provide intuitive graphical workflows and will therefore be in lockstep with updates to the interface.
Prior to DX, Salesforce developers had to remember what changes they made to their development org and make sure that they added it to their change sets to push to UAT or production environments. Salesforce DX, on the other hand, keeps track of all changes and can automatically push them up to production. Developers also don't need to worry about usernames, passwords, or access tokens when using it to create scratch orgs because it's automatically managed by the CLI. Win, win!
If you are interested in improving efficiency, you owe it to yourself to give DX a shot. If you manage a team of Salesforce developers, if you are an individual software developer, if you're an Independent Software Vendor or a Salesforce administrator, the potential that Salesforce DX has is astronomical. Embrace it!
Figure Source: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/02/getting-started-salesforce-dx-part-5-5.html
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