As my final days at EE come around, I’m starting to make some headway in getting to understand more about the architecture and nuances of frontend development and the associated frameworks. Hand in hand with this education also comes an implicit syllabus relating to the development workflow, and in particular the tooling that’s available. I wrote about a JS tooling workshop I attended in this post and this week I attended one of the Salesforce developer meetups and there we also covered tooling, specifically David Helmer talked about MavensMate and how that can be used in Salesforce development.
Like the previous events that I’ve attended the meetup was held at the Make Positive offices and once again they were great hosts and sponsors, supplying beer and pizza, just what the doctor ordered.
Mavensmate is a plugin for several IDEs, most commonly used with sublime but there are plans to also include support for atom.io too in the near future. Essentially it gives developers an open source, apex IDE.
Primarily built and supported by Joe Ferraro it’s a cross platform tool that gives Salesforce developers a tool to match those available to developers who are using other languages such as PHP and JavaScript.
David kicked off his talk by announcing that it’ll take the form of a live demo…. there was the inevitable feeling in the room that we could be in for some good-ol squirming. What followed though was anything but, thanks it seems to the wonderful features of, not only Sublime Text, but also Mavensmate itself.
Demonstrations of many features were presented. Key ones (read those that I made a note of and can remember) were;
- It’s open source… pull it and contribute
- Editing and compilation of apex code (via force.com platform)
- Resource bundle handling and uploading
- Templating
- Auto completion of functions and variables
- Apex Testing – And whilst your tests are running there’s a whole host of games you can play (pacman etc), genius
- Anonymous apex (exec) – runs ad-hoc code platform.
- Project meta data can be pulled down viewed
- Fetching debug logs
See the MavensMate documentation pages for more information.
I had tried previously to get MavensMate running in Sublime Text 3 on Ubuntu, but without luck… but I’ll certainly be trying again and will contact Joe if I’m still having issues.
Sadly I was unable to hang around and chat with the other Salesforcers, they’re a good bunch and it was a shame not to catch up with them… hopefully next time.