Salesforce previews: Low-code and Pro-code developer tools

Slated for summer, winter and spring releases, the newest Salesforce developer tools include a low-code compliance tool that developers and non-developers alike can use, a gathering place where users can coordinate their development efforts, and more developer-centric features.

Einstein Data Detect uses AI to find data such as credit card of driver’s license numbers and other personally identifiable information protected under law. This we can find on the Salesforce low-code side.

It’s quite often that employees and customers alike enter such data into the wrong field on a form or screen. Proactive security measures can indeed lockdown PII when it has been entered in the correct field, but those measures can’t do anything when data has been pasted into a free-text field, said Ryan Ellis, Salesforce’s senior VP of platform. PII can be surfaced with tools made with Einstein Data Detect which will help admins identify those issues and correct them.

Gartner analyst Jason Wong said, “Anything that has the word ‘Einstein’ on it is about automation. Einstein Data Detect is one way to help with removing some of the manual steps in order to adhere to regulator and compliance requirements.”

With the upcoming summer release of the Salesforce platform, Einstein Data Detect will become available. A major release is coming next winter, a series of 150 low-code application building blocks called Dynamic Interactions.

Unified command-line interface for pro coders

There are some new tools for pro-code Salesforce developers in the upcoming Salesforce releases as well. Salesforce plans to unify disparate command-line interfaces (CLIs) from different areas of the platform such as SFDX in the coming Winter ’22 release. SFDX manages core Salesforce applications such as Heroku, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and MuleSoft.

They will all be accessible from one central command line and they’ll use a common set of vernacular and patterns.

While it’s a new feature, all the old command lines are built into it as well, so whatever language a developer had been using before will work with the unified CLI.

Ellis said, “That just makes it easier for developers to potentially take any action across the entirety of Salesforce’s capabilities with a single tool. So, instead of having to learn multiple different CLIs, or script against those things in different kinds of ways, it’s all the same one.”

He went on to say that while CLIs had gone out of favour for a while as low-code tools emerged, they’ve made a comeback. Developers realised that command lines remained the most efficient way to perform tasks such as installing software packages or running scripts.

DevOps Center, will also be coming to Salesforce next spring. It’ll be a centralised location for keeping track of changes to a user’s Salesforce instance, coordinate development activity and apply governance to development efforts. It’ll also help teams launch apps and experiences faster through its integration with version control systems and migrating app changes across test sandboxes. Salesforce said that none of that will require custom code.

These new Salesforce low-code and developer tools were previewed at the TrailheadDX virtual developer conference.

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