Please contact your congressperson today.

I’ve already initialized my submodule of course:

git submodule add git@github.com:mysubmodule mySubmoduleDir

At some point later I try this.

git submodule update 

Ha ha you fool! This only gets you the copy that your submodule is already frozen at.

Try this instead:

cd mySubmoduleDirectory
git checkout master
git pull

Yes, I was the fool. You can go away now.

Even though in a certain sense I’ve never met a wiener I didn’t like, I’d prefer that if you were fighting on my side you had a proper weapon –
and no matter how many skillz you got, it always helps to sharpen them.

Part of the reason I like this approach so much is that there is very little unnecessary baggage. You figure out what you need to by reading the code, with a few quizzes where you write some code so that the lessons sink in. As things stand I think the quizzes are a little bit under-developed, and as a whole it could probably be a bit more content as far as examples and gradually developing a theme, but hey JResig has a whole book coming out soon. Another fantastic feature is that you can edit each example as you go along, so if something is not immediately obvious you can tweak it or can add in the necessary log statements.

As far as this goes, I believe this is the future of programming education (and education in general). Less paper, less explanation, more interaction, more cementing of the material. In other words, less talking, more doing.

Keep in mind this is a Ninja-level tutorial, so it assumes a fair bit of knowledge of Javascript that you probably won’t have if you’ve just been waving around a wiener. That said and despite some rough edges, I will repeat and say it is the best online tutorial I have ever seen.

Here are some highlights:

Context – One of the funkier bits of JS.
Closures – Show don’t tell. Love it!
Function Prototypes – A lot you can do here but tricky to get right
Inheritance – You have to understand this well if you are doing any Advanced Javascript

Truly awesome is when you get to see how all the building blocks fit together towards the end of the book as Resig appropriate builds up to (rather than dissects) the Prototype bind function.

I end with this beautiful example:

var ninja = { 
  yell: function(n){ 
    return n > 0 ? ninja.yell(n-1) + "a" : "hiy"; 
  } 
}; 

In case you were wondering, we are hiring ninjas over at Tquila.

If you are experiencing this problem, the solution is probably to switch accounts. In my case I was in as one of my Page accounts instead of my normal accounts. Once I switched back recaptcha worked as usual.

Hope this helps someone!

I will summarize here all of the sessions covering Heroku and Ruby along with what you should know about the status of Ruby right now in the enterprise world, then present a summary and evaluation of Dreamforce presentations as a whole. It’s worth mentioning that all of these are among the most popular sessions, both from impressions at Dreamforce and Youtube views afterwards.

From high-level to very technical:

Platform State of the Union
The Platform State of the Union is the one *must* attend event for all developers. Highlights were the vision for the future of the platform by Byron Sebastian (former CEO Heroku, now Senior Vice President of Platform Technology), from 2:01-6:30, an appearance by the creator of Ruby and now, employee at Heroku, Matz, 6:40 – 8:40, as well as an extensive example from Barry Newman of Saveology of utilization of Heroku and Force.com platforms 35:48 – 45:00, followed and preceded by comments by Dave Carroll, Director of Dev Evangelism for Salesforce.

Heroku in the Enterprise
Oren Teich, COO @ Heroku
Very visually compelling and enthusiastic presentation by Oren Teich that gives a good introduction to the Heroku platform. Appropriately emphasized the core strengths of Heroku,”You as a developer have complete control over what is going on in your app.” Didn’t quite connect the dots as far as what would be compelling use cases for existing Salesforce customers. Nonetheless, my favorite presentation at Dreamforce.

Connecting Ruby Apps with Force.com
Alex Sutherland (Mavens) and Joel Dietz (me!)
Originally slated to be a more technical presentation, ended up being a high-level presentation of the use cases for hybrid apps that leverage the strengths of using the right tool for the right job. Also gives the history of Ruby integrations from the folks with the most experience (mainly Alex). Presented some compelling use cases for Ruby/Heroku utilization (although Joel Dietz said “umm” too many times, esp. at the beginning).

Building and Deploying Great Applications with Salesforce, Ruby, and Heroku
Danny Burkes, Pivotal Labs
Presentation by lead developer on how to use the new Database.com gem released by Salesforce at Dreamforce (see my earlier post for some background on this).

Using Ruby on Heroku
Alex Wong, Salesforce.com
Starter presentation on how to get a Ruby on Rails app running on Heroku. Another presentation with similar content was given by Morten Bagai (but doesn’t seem to have made its way to youtube).

Connect your Clouds with Force.com
Jeff Douglas, Appirio
Attempting to do a bit of everything and generally succeeding is Jeff Douglas. See his high-level description at 3:55 and demo of a mobile device focusing on Heroku at 36:14.

In general, all of the bases were covered somewhere at Dreamforce. There were introductory sessions for Ruby the language, introductory sessions for how to employ Heroku, high-level introductory sessions to the platform, and a couple sessions that showed compelling use cases and showed the when and what is the right tool for the job. In general, the Heroku sessions set a new standard for compelling presentations, and I’m confident that things will continue to progress in this direction — despite the fact that some of us (::cough cough::), continue to be forced to use the standard Salesforce powerpoint template.

Another thing, and I am confident that this will be resolved in the next six months or so, is the lack of an unified and compelling vision for what is the right tool when. The increased investment in all parts of the platform is fantastic, but there is still a bit more to be done as far as connecting the dots with existing enterprise clients of Salesforce and Heroku.

The examples here will be assuming you use Heroku for hosting and deployment although you can use all of the features mentioned without Heroku if you so chose.

This is also for the most part a tutorial and not a replacement for the existing documentation includes as part of the databasedotcom gem on Github and shared via Ruby docs, which hopefully will be expanded as the gem gets some love.

There are two main components of the current release:

(1) A wrapper for the Force.com REST API which currently works with both Force.com and Database.com
(2) A wrapper for the Chatter API which will not be useful until Winter ’12 (or in orgs w/ api v. 23 already enabled)

There is also an additional controller released separately on Github which provides a class that your controllers (assuming you are using a Rails app) can extend. By doing so they will instantly get access to the Force.com or Database.com backend you are hooking into.

As of right now, the gem only supports Ruby 1.9.x, although support for earlier versions of Ruby is promised within the very near future. Although the development of the gem was commissioned by Salesforce/Heroku, maintenance is less certain and depends largely on your contributions.

The first thing you need to do is include the gem in your app. Add the databasedotcom gem to your Gemfile.

gem 'databasedotcom'

If desired, use the edge version instead of the released gem version. This will allow you to get the latest version (you will probably want this if testing in the next couple of days, not necessarily later once the few warts have been ironed out).

gem 'databasedotcom', :git => "https://github.com/heroku/databasedotcom.git"

I’m assuming you’ve already initialized your app on Heroku. If not, go through the Heroku starter tutorial and create your heroku app.

I also recommend adding ssl to your Heroku app:

heroku addons:add ssl:piggyback

The first thing you need to do is add your credentials. You will need to add remote access for your heroku app in Salesforce (Setup -> Develop -> Remote Access).

Note your consumer key and secret. For the purposes of this gem, the client id is always your consumer key, and client secret is the same as consumer secret.

You can add this information to your app in one of three ways: (1) explicitly passing a hash. (2) Setting environment variables via Heroku (3) setting up a yml file in your config folder with the credentials. I recommend doing (3) unless you have a reason to use one of the other options.

The second thing you need to do to authenticate is do the OAuth handshake.
I recommend using the username and password combination for the user with the appropriate permissions for your org.

These can also be set in your yml file. I recommend also turning on debugging.

This will lead to a file called “databasedotcom.yml” in the config folder with the following info:

client_id: CONSUMER_KEY_FROM_REMOTE_ACCESS
client_secret: SECRET_FROM_REMOTE_ACCESS
username: SALESFORCE_USERNAME
password: PASSWORD_PLUS_SEC_TOKEN
debugging: true

Now make sure that is included and deploy the yml to Heroku.

To actually use the gem I recommend starting by extending the databasedotcom controller. Your code will look like this:

class SObjectNameController < DatabasedotcomController

You can then easily refer to the objects you need in that controller.

For instance in the index method you can do

@users = User.all

Where “User” is now your automagically instantiated SObject class queried via the REST API. The way this works is that if you use a variable (e.g. “User”) that is unknown to the class it will find all of the available SObjects and attempt to instantiate a new instance.

That should be enough to get you started. A bunch of other useful examples are in dburkes’ example code.

One note of caution, there is as of yet no session management for this app, so if your auth token times out you will need to re-authenticate yourself.

Dress code

Force: Probably forced to wear a suit from time to time and doesn’t mind it all that much, so long as it doesn’t always include a tie.
Heroku: Will look at you in a strange way if you suggest they wear a suit. And probably never talk to you again…

Emerging Tech

Force: Laughs at Salesforce announcements while reading the safe harbor statement and knows that he won’t get promised tech for a few more release cycles.
Heroku: Itching to get hands on new tech (Clojure, Node, etc.), spends his evenings working on side projects for fun.

Tools
Force: Likely using a snazzy IDE like the Force.com IDE (harhar). Occasionally upvotes ideas for new and better tools in the IdeaExchange but knows that his voice is not likely to be heard. Like here. ::cries::
Heroku: Very comfortable on the command line and using a text editor w/ nifty shortcuts like Textmate or a pro editor like Vim/Emacs. Generally sets up his own environment and doesn’t think or care much for the IDE world.

$$$
Force: Paid because every company of a certain size uses Salesforce because it is baddest most kick-ass CRM solution ever.
Heroku: Probably leveraging Rails or another Ruby framework to deliver small to mid-size web apps. When finds that some client uses Salesforce is a bit confused as to why. Looks at the UI and says, “Aaaaah! So 1990!” May attempt to convince VCs that they can build the next Salesforce on Rails.

Meetups
Force: Goes to conferences, listens to lots of lame jokes, drinks many liters of koolaid, and shouts or tweets “hurrah! hurrah!” as much as he possibly can. Possibly stops going out.
Heroku: Goes to conferences that are for developers only and heatedly discusses the pain points of the new edge rails version over a pint afterwards.

Configuration/Division of Labor
Force: Probably ends up doing some configuration because, oh my goodness, Salesforce is hella complex. Err, shouldn’t there be an admin here somewhere? Thankfully most of the time there is (I love you admins!). Designers are usually not employed, because Salesforce provides all the design for you (but should it? Stay tuned for my top secret jQuery Theme Engine for Salesforce…).
Heroku: Everything is code. There are only developers, no admins. Designers usually deliver css, etc. developers, who implement, although sometimes you have designers that can touch up Rails views themselves.

Integration
Force: Knows that the watchword of every mid-to-large size company is “integration” and probably spends lots of time with different APIs moving information from one data silo to another.
Heroku: If asked about integration, will say “Here is the sexy JSON REST API for my app, integrate to it however you want!”

Enterprise
Heroku: Enterprise epitomizes needless cruft and annoyances that developers who care about pushing forward technological possibilities shouldn’t have to worry about.
Force: What’s to think about? What is, is. Back to waiting for an awesome new version of the Force.com IDE. Oh, can I please get my stapler back?

It sounds like Byron Sebastian & co at Salesforce are not particularly keen to attempt to integrate these two communities, which makes a good deal of sense. It isn’t clear to me that they can co-exist. However, the road forward is far from clear. Much, although certainly not all of the Salesforce developer community are not developers in the traditional sense, having started with Salesforce’s “Clicks not Code” mantra and gone on to occasionally build triggers and other things necessary in the Salesforce environment that will be unusual if not incomprehensible to those used to working on smaller apps. This is entirely different from enthusiast programmers, who, despite a lot of experience with certain aspects of the cutting edge, usually don’t worry about problems of a certain annoyance level and/or complexity (e.g. scaling, integration) that every large company has to worry about. In other words, there is often a “bite the bullet and get the job done” attitude among experienced Force developers that makes them optimally suited for solving the sorts of problems that large companies have.

Great developers in both worlds will see the benefits that are there on each platform and the accompanying community. Salesforce should take every opportunity to merge these where this is appropriate, providing a seamless experience to those who want to bridge the gap. With this, there is an increasing need for elite teams that can acknowledge and utilize the strengths of both areas. In fact, this will be a major focus in my Dreamforce session on connecting Ruby on Rails apps with Force.com. Stay tuned.