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While I realize lots of people love to upload their Static Resources one at a time from the web based interface, this can be a bit time consuming. Here’s how you pop them up into Salesforce from Eclipse.
First, if this is a static resource you already have in another project, it is super easy:
(1) Copy myStaticResource.resource file and myStaticResource.resource-meta.xml from yourWorkspace/project1/staticresources to yourWorkspace/project2/staticresources
(2) Open up Eclipse, right click on the project and click refresh, and you should see myStaticResource in your staticresources folder.
(3) Right click on myStaticResource -> Force.com -> Save to Server.
Oila! (Note: you can also do this with massive numbers of files at once, my preferred method)
Dealing with a new file is a little bit more tricky but not all that tricky.
(1) Find the items you want to go into a zip file.
(2) Compress them (see note at the end for my preferred method).
(3) Change the extension from .zip to .resource (on a mac this is achieved by pressing Command-I then changing the name).
(4) Move to yourWorkspace/myProject/staticresources folder
(5) Copy existing ‘resource-meta.xml’ file for another zipped static resource from any project. (if you don’t know find the file in Eclipse, open it and check that the contentType is ‘application/x-zip-compressed’)
(6) Rename this file ‘myStaticResource.resource-meta.xml’
(7) Open up Eclipse, right click on the project and click refresh, and you should see myStaticResource in your staticresources folder.
(8) Right click on myStaticResource -> Force.com -> Save to Server.
Random note: These days on OS X I go into the folder, select the files, and choose compress rather than right clicking on the folder so you don’t have to put the folder name in the path when you are referring to a static resource via URLFOR. You can easily find the path to any file in your archive by running ‘unzip -l myStaticResource.zip’ on the command line.
Additional note: my desktop background is from this site.
My informal querying of Force.com developers reveals that with VMForce there are currently more questions than answers. While Salesforce sought immediately to dispel some of the questions that Visualforce/APEX would be left behind, in the fast paced sink or swim world of internet technology, a couple people on a dingy with paddles will soon be overtaken by those with the first available on-board motor.
Which raises the question of just who Salesforce is competing with. Is Salesforce, as the Appirians suggest, simply providing a gilded road into their cloud by allowing greater compatibility with legacy JAVA apps and providing “even hesitant enterprise CIOs” with a place to start? Or is it, as suggested on Javaworld, “an audacious jump to get Salesforce.com away from its ERP roots and into the general-interest cloud territory being staked out by Google and Amazon” ? Perhaps ZDNet has the best discussion of the issues: if Salesforce is truly “embracing the cloud” here, then they “pragmatically trades scalability of a unitary architecture for scalability through a virtualized one,” it also “morphs into a different creature.”
But even here it is not clear what new creature this is (see image). Salesforce can no longer simply compete with Oracle business applications, can it realistically think to match Amazon or Google to be a leader in a PaaS (Platform as Service) race? While it is one thing to take potshots at Microsoft’s failures in this regard (something I’d be all to happy to do myself), it seems clear that Microsoft will not be leading this pack.
While Mike Leach may be right to say that taking a step back may not be such a bad thing, Wes Nolte correctly summarizes the relative strengths of Google’s Web Toolkit in what one might consider Salesforce’s core area of strength and Force201 questions whether or not the 5x statistic regarding development speed holds for more than very short projects. Moreover, it’s been bandied about in various places that the primary venues for soliciting input about changes to Force.com, such as the Salesforce Idea Exchange, respond more closely to the needs of users and admins (who outnumber developers).
How can Salesforce emerge the heavyweight champion in the battle for the Enterprise cloud? I’d recommend the following:
(1) Articulate more clearly the gameplan to the developer community
Mike Leach has a great set of questions which I look forward to seeing the answers to.
(2) Develop a clear resource based pricing model to accompany VMForce, with decreased costs as bandwidth increases
As Wes Nolte also notes, the obvious answer for developers working off of PaaS is resource based pricing, which is clear and transparent in the case of Google and Amazon, but a bit murkier in the case of Salesforce.
(3) Improve developer tools
I’m 110% behind everything articulated by Wes in this article. Number 1 bugaboo: things are slow.
(4) Work off of existing Salesforce strengths
Tight integration between the code/platform and security are musts for many use cases.
(5) Leverage Chatter
Chatter is great, but could be better if, as I articulated at Cloudforce NYC last month, the benefits of social media technology for the enterprise were better articulated. Just how exactly do these technologies improve productivity? While we’re at it, why not extend the Chatter Dev Zone to include formal processes for developer feedback and/or bug tracking?
