Cert Prep with a side of integration

 Not much has changed since my last post, I'm still preparing for my Certified Platform App Builder exam but much closer to sitting exam. Motivation has been hard when everything is point and click. Never the less i have been getting better but a bit worried i might fail.

In order to keep motivation up and my coding skills sharp I have been doing some projects on the side. It started with working on an auction web app which i keep meaning to get around to. I started messed up and started again but made some progress and learnt more about converting Java objects to JSON.

After speaking with my learning advisor i was suggested to do some projects with Salesforce. Still need to prepare for the exam but in my spare time work on salesforce projects on the side. At first I was reluctant, my side projects were to escape from Salesforce for a while. Not that i don't like it but it feels like work, not something i want to do on my days off. So i decided to rebuild my project ideas with Salesforce, that way i get to code but also practice my core CRM knowledge. The idea is to use Salesforce as a back end / database and code a middleware and front end and host it on Heroku.

Before i can get started on that I needed to figure out how to integrate my code with Salesforce. At first this seemed intimidating but after much patience i got it to work. I initially created a solution in Java hosted here (note this is not all my code). I then tried to do the same in nodejs this took longer than expected at first nothing worked like it did with Java. I eventually came across JSforce which is a JavaScript library created to make connecting to Salesforce easier. I was then quickly able to come up with some code to connect, query and create a new object. Code can be found here. 

I now hope to create a entire app backed by Salesforce to show of my new Salesforce skills and my cloud and coding skills. Although i will keep my options open i will most likely host on Heroku which i've done some Trailhead modules on and looks good. The only issue i can see with Heroku is lack of local storage so files will need to be store somewhere else. either in Salesforce which would be costly to a real business or maybe Amazon S3 which i do not currently have access too.

Hope fully by my next post i will have my cert. until then ...