Sales force Deployment Tool Eclipse IDE

Sales force Deployment Tool Eclipse IDE

Given below are advantage and limitation of tools which are used in code and configuration changes deployment from Sandbox to Production.

1. Force.com IDE/ Eclipse IDE

The Force.com IDE is a powerful client application for creating, modifying and deploying Force.com applications into production environment. Based on the Eclipse platform, it provides a comfortable environment for programmer’s familiar with integrated development environments, allowing you to code, compile, test, and package and deploy all from within the IDE itself.

The IDE also features an embedded schema explorer same as Sales force Explorer for a live view of your database and metadata components. Using the standard synchronization features of the IDE, you can create a project that enables multiple developers to develop against a shared source code repository.

Following are the advantages and disadvantage of tool.

Advantage:

1. It provides a comfortable environment for programmers familiar with integrated development environments, allowing you to the code, compile, test, and package and deploy all from within the IDE itself.
2. It provide the code editor following are features:
• Syntax highlighting for the Apex key words.
• Code assist for Apex system classes, user-defined classes, and schema objects.
• Click-to-line integration with errors and testing views.
• Unlimited undo and redo.
• Tabbed views of source code and XML metadata definition on app.

3. We can validate the selected classes/trigger etc before deployment.
4. Execute Anonymous view, which allows you to run the anonymous block of Apex on the server. Anonymous blocks help you to the quickly evaluate Apex on the fly, or to write scripts that change dynamically at runtime.
5. Force.com IDE provides an Apex Test Runner view where you can test your methods to see which the tests are are passing or failing helpful in Test class.
6. Metadata files are the text-based, they also can be compared using text diff tools, managed in a version control system such as CVS or Subversion, and even deployed from one Salesforce organization to another
7. The Schema Explorer is the tool for browsing the objects and fields in a Force.com organization. The browser presents the logged-in user’s view of the Force.com database model, including object visibility, permissions, data types, lookup values and other information that is useful in developing applications on the Force.com platform.
8. Project Synchronization working Online or Offline project.
9. If deployment fail it will shows the errors with line number.
10. A version control system allows you to track changes to a set of files over the time.

Disadvantage:

1. It takes long time for loading and deployments which is initialization step of our project.
2. We can’t run our visual force page GUI on browser.
3. Detailed logs are not generated in Integrated Development Environment. For example system log file.
4. We are not able to update user profiles using eclipse IDE. Like configuration changes not done in this tool.