Building Salesforce Managed Packages for a B2B SaaS Product

Question

I recently had to build a simple Salesforce managed package for my startup. It enabled a two way sync between a custom object in salesforce and the data in our system. At the end of the day, it was basically a simple CRUD app.However, this process was way more painful than expected. I had to learn Apex, Visualforce, and all the nuances of the salesforce developer platform. Salesforce documentation is really focused on building apps inside salesforce, so I ended up relying on blog posts to fill in the gaps. All in all, a project that should have taken a few days or a week ended up taking two months!How are folks, especially in the early stages, building their Salesforce integrations? Is there a tool? Paying a consultant? Sucking it up and just doing it?

rawgabbit · Accepted Answer

Salesforce ecosystem is huge. They offer online instructor courses https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/academy. I have used mulesoft which is expensive clunky and really a Java shell. My favorite tool is forceamp DBAMP which excels at replicating SF to a SQL server instance and bulk operations/updates to SF. Perhaps the easiest integration is Heroku Salesforce Connect that auto syncs SF with a heroku postgressql DB. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-connect