Spanning Salesforce Blog

Spanning Feed Builder Gets a Big Performance Boost

I've written before about various optimizations I've done to Spanning Feed Builder, but I just made a change that will have a dramatic impact, not only on load times of the S-Control, but also on my bandwidth bill.

When a user logs into Salesforce.com and clicks on the Feeds tab to access SFB, a back-end process builds a model of that user's objects and fields and ships it down to the browser as a big glob (somewhere north of 500K in size) of JavaScript. Until now, that big glob was getting sent every time the user returned to the Feeds tab. But now that glob is cached by the user's browser¹ along with the user's Salesforce.com session, so after subsequent clicks on the Feeds tab result in almost immediate screen redraw. This is a big usability win.

The only downside is that in the rare event a user modifies his object model, say, by adding a new custom application, object, or field, the Feeds tab will have out-of-date information—but only for the duration of the current session. So logging out and logging back in brings the Feeds tab up to date. (Navigating around the site long enough for the session ID to change will work too.)

So one big optimization is done, and only one design flaw is yet to be addressed before next week's announcement.

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¹ Unless that browser is Mac OS X Safari, which completely ignores cache directives. Ugh.

SFB Now Supports Documents and Attachments

Document and Attachment feeds created with Spanning Feed Builder now feature RSS enclosures containing the appropriate file. To create a "New and Updated Documents" feed:

1. Select "All" and "Documents" for the data type
2. Select "Last Modified Date" and "Is on or after", and enter "7 days ago" for the criteria, then click "Add"
3. Select "Document Name" for the title, then click "Add Field"
4. Enter "New and Updated Documents" for the feed title
5. Click "Build Feed"

Once you've subscribed to the feed, just set your feed reader to automatically download enclosures and you'll always have the latest version of your documents stored in Salesforce available locally.

Service Restored

Today at 16:37 GMT, the facility that hosts the Spanning Salesforce servers experienced a power issue (either a loss or a surge--they're not sure which) that took down several routers, leaving Spanning Salesforce unreachable. Service was restored at 21:14 GMT.

Spanning Feed Builder 1.0 on the AppExchange

Check it out and let me know what you think!

https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a033000000252knAAA

Update: As luck would have it, a switch has failed at our hosting facility, taking Spanning Salesforce--and the new feed builder--offline. I'll post a notice when it's back up.

Changes Under the Hood

The AppExchange Feed Builder pulls a good deal of data down from salesforce.com, so I've been looking for a way to speed things up.

I initially went down the path of using AJAX to only pull down information as needed, but due to some quirks in the design of the sforce API, that didn't address my problem.

Happily, I discovered that a long-standing bug in PHP's SOAP compression has been fixed in the 5.1.4 release, so I was able to upgrade my servers, make the appropriate changes to the sforce PHP Toolkit, and shave about 35% off of the Feed Builder's initialization time, from an average of 6.5s to 4.3s.

The changes will also improve the performance of all of the Spanning Salesforce feeds.

Cool!

AppExchange Feed Builder Alpha

I've been hard at work on Spanning Salesforce v4.0, which in the halls at Spanning Partners we refer to as "Infinity" since the major feature is that it will enable an infinite number of (user-created) feeds. If you're extremely brave and not afraid of ugly error messages and a sparse UI, feel free to check it out. Just log in with your salesforce.com username and password.

If you'd like a little help figuring things out or would like to report a bug, drop me an email at charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com.

Thanks!

It's Good to Be the Platform

Last month at SAPPHIRE, Erik Keller and Vinnie Mirchandani ganged up on SAP platform ecosystem EVP Zia Yusuf, accusing him of letting ISV's shoulder the risk of exploring uncharted application areas, then taking over the areas that prove fertile. Well guess what, guys. It's good to be the platform.

In the Enterprise 2.0 space, the most promising platform is salesforce.com's recently-launched AppExchange. Mobius VC Principal Seth Levine goes so far as to say the AppExchange is the New Black. (Seth, 2005 called. It wants its meme back. :-))

Obviously, I agree that the AppExchange is great platform to build on--I've spent a lot time over the past year immersed in the AppExchange (née On-Demand Marketplace) universe, meeting with partners to understand the ecosystem, and creating services to extend the platform itself. And I'm hardly alone.

The AppExchange now boasts over 250 applications, the most interesting of which bring together the CRM capabilities of Salesforce with the tidal forces of Web 2.0. For instance, Kieden (which I wrote about here) elegantly fuses Salesforce and Google AdWords. Google itself has extended the AppExchange platform with its own enterprise search appliance. There are even components to integrate Skype into Salesforce.

The AppExchange platform is far from perfect. For instance, the new OEM Edition is a severely limited implementation of what could prove to be a profound idea. Basic database capabilities like joins and and sorting are missing from the AppExchange API. And of course, there's the availability issue. But the people at salesforce.com are incredibly smart and move very quickly. I expect their platform to be a dominant force in Enterprise 2.0.