What does HTML5 mean to Force.com ???

Dream 19

There's a lot of buzz around HTML5 making into the W3C recommendation stage later this year. Even Steve Jobs has recently said, HTML5 would kill Flash very soon and hence Apple is not much concerned about its current lack of support for Flash in most of its gadgets. Different people have different thoughts around the evolution of HTML5 but these are what I think would be the minimum impacts/advantages for the Force.com folks.

• Visualforce APIs would get richer to support the new HTML5 tags such as video, audio, canvas, dialog and many more.
  
• I think Drag & Drop and HTML containers would be the deal breaker for us. Again, this would be part of VF enhancements.
• I also have a sneaky feeling that Force.com developers would be given the luxury to contribute to Visualforce API development. I know I'm dreaming too much... lol.
• There should be no big enhancements to Apex, because HTML5 is all about the presentation layer.
• Last but not least Force.com end users need not install flash plug-ins on their browsers if their Salesforce Org. uses flash/flex driven interfaces.

I don't think all these would happen over night. It would be a slow transition but I agree with Jobs. Why should we create a plug-in dependency to run a application on a no-software platform such as force.com ?? I like flex/flash for what it is .. but I wish all the flashy features need to be part of W3C at some point of time.

Spring'10 exceeded my expectations

Dream 18

As Ben Parker once said,"With great power comes great responsibility". With the Salesforce.com release of spring’10, developers & architects now have great responsibilities to design & develop more efficient & powerful salesforce.com solutions. The release features are so powerful enough to turn certain dreams of force.com developers into a reality... I know, we all know, about the Out-of-the-box enhancements in spring’10. Be it the auto complete on standard search fields, dashboard running user display enhancements, etc... they rock as usual.But I'm most impressed with the implementation of the below ideas:

1. Elimination of the governor limit set on the number of items a collection can hold. Phew ... watt a relief...lolz.

2. Chained relationships... Master -> Child -> Sub-Child. Way to go!

3. When we get into an argument about Cloud vs. Distributed computing, Java/Unix/windows developers/architects used to ask me quite often... what kind of platform is force.com if I cannot have the ability to run my code at scheduled times?? Apex Code Scheduler was made GA. We now have an answer to Cron jobs :)

4.The 3 most wanted aggregate functions in SOQL. Min, Max & Sum.

I'm just excited!!!