Tips for working with Force.com IDE
Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 12:06 Written by Steve Wednesday, 27 August 2008 12:06
I’ve doing Salesforce.com development with Eclipse as my IDE for over two years now and it’s truly indispensable. It hasn’t been the easiest thing to learn and use, however. Eclipse is a complex beast–it’s really trying to meet the development needs of an amazing disparate group of users. And it’s a framework on which plugins sit, which is a powerful but scary proposition.
As I said, though, it’s indispensable for Salesforce coding. And even though it’s big and gnarly, I genuinely like using it most of the time. Here are some tips that might help you like using Eclipse for Salesforce as well:
Get latest “supported” versions of Eclipse and plugin
The Eclipse framework is an open source tool that periodically comes out with a new release. The Force.com IDE is a plugin that sits on top of that framework, and it has it’s own release cycle, controlled by the folks at Salesforce.com.
You should get on the latest version of Eclipse and the Force.com IDE that Salesforce.com recommends. At the time of this writing, that’s Eclipse 3.3 and Force.com IDE 13.0.
The latest Eclipse version is 3.4, but Salesforce.com hasn’t tested IDE 13.0 with it, so they don’t recommend it. I’m using 3.4 and haven’t had any problems except the small one that if you delete an Open Force.com project your code will be deleted from your Salesforce.com instance! Trust me, you want to stay on the Eclipse version Salesforce.com recommends–you’ll be happiest that way.
Whitelist your network
Eclipse is a “client app” which means it’s accessing Salesforce.com from your desktop. Because of that, it’s not trusted, and needs to be given the OK to talk to Salesforce.com. You can do this one of two ways–get your security token and use that or whitelist your network.
I highly recommend never using security tokens if you don’t have to! You can white list your network at Setup | Security Controls | Network Access
Once you do that, Eclipse will be able to connect to your Salesforce.com instance from that location.
Change your fonts
Maybe I’m just getting old, but the fonts in Eclipse are hard to read. I can’t easily tell a { from a (, which in coding is a pretty important distinction to make! Set your text font in Eclipse under Window | Preferences.
After trying some different fonts, I landed on Consolas with cleartype turned on in Windows.
Maximize screen real estate when coding
The Eclipse is set up with panels that you can drag around to create the look you want. It’s very flexible. It’s nice to see your code and the list of all code files and the test runner, all in one view. But, when you’re coding, use CTRL+M to quickly hide all the other panes, then hit it again to bring them back.
Refresh your projects often when multiple people are involved
In Eclipse you are working with local text files. Because of this, what you’re looking at might not reflect what is really in Salesforce.com at that instant, especially if you have multiple people working in the same instance. You can refresh what you have on your computer with what is in Salesforce.com, and I recommend doing it pretty regularly so you don’t get in the situation where you’re working on old code. The new IDE is much better at warning you when that happens, but it’s much better to not get into that situation.
Be Patient
Working on local text files is quick, but saving those up to Salesforce.com isn’t. You’re pushing files to San Francisco, and that takes time. But, there are other things going on. The two things that take the most time are compiling and running of tests. It’s great that these things happen automatically for you, but you have to be patient as they take the time to make sure you’re not breaking your instance. It’s worth the wait.
When you save a file, the Problems tab turns to italics. When the save is done, it goes back to regular text.
Close Projects to Keep Workspace Smaller
Having many projects handy is great, because you can go and steal code from on to put in another, but slows down the workspace. Searches and synchronization take longer. You can create Force.com projects for all your instances and close the ones you don’t care about right now. It’s two clicks to open them back up.
Compare and Merge Files Across Instances
This is a basic one, but very handy–Eclipse has a text compare feature where you can take two files and show how they differ. This is great for adding functionality from one instance to another where similar code already exists.
Deploy when possible, but Drag and Drop is Quicker
The Force.com IDE has a deployment wizard which is great for moving code between two instances. It’s really nice. The latest release of the IDE has gone one step further, adding robust drag and drop functionality. It’s kind of like deploying without the deploy wizard. Sometimes it’s faster to just drag and drop, but sometimes only the deploy wizard will work for what you’re trying to do.
Connect to other systems
I said earlier that Eclipse was trying to meet the needs of a very diverse developer audience. The good part of that is there are some killer plugins for connecting Eclipse to other systems out there.
You can connect your Force.com project to a Subversion code repository so that all your Salesforce.com code can be version controlled in the industry standard system.
Mylyn is a cool add-on (included in Eclipse 3.4) that allows you to connect to ticket or task management systems out there like Trac, or Google Code Projects. It makes managing code issues and bugs very nice and collaborative.
Conclusion
It’s becoming increasingly mandatory to use Eclipse for developing with Force.com. That’s a good thing, once you climb the learning curve. Eclipse is a good IDE that is amazingly extensible. Just think about what Salesforce.com is doing with their plugin–they’ve taken a tool that is used to dealing with text files and have it working with their database-stored code and config. Pretty amazing, really.
If you are using Eclipse with Force.com, please comment with any cool things I’m missing–it’s a sprawling tool. If you haven’t been using Eclipse, you really should!
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Indispensable wisdom as always.
While I can’t think of any other IDE tips off the top of my head, I will recommend my favorite programming font to use, and that’s Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10.zip
Thanks for the link! There are some nice, clean fonts out there.
Have they released the Force.com plugin for Eclipse 3.4 yet? Last check I had they were still only compatible with 3.3.2 (I ask because I noticed your mention of Mylyn in 3.4, which is very cool, but…)