Dreamforce 2013 Developer Keynote Highlights

Just finished watching the developer keynote from this years dreamforce..

here are some of the key highlights that i noted down from this hour long video..

Force.com Command Line Interface (CLI)
its an open source tool to help developers access the salesforce instance and all of the objects (standard, custom), run soql queries, import & export of metadata, etc..

Introduction
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2013/11/announcing-the-command-line-interface-for-force-com.html

Some more details
http://www.wadewegner.com/2013/11/a-command-line-interface-for-forcecom/

source code and setup
https://github.com/heroku/force

API.. API.. API.. API...
one of the buzzword througout this dreamforce is API.. most of the stuff in salesforce platform is now API enabled.. this will be the base for cross platform, device independent, application development.
since most of the integration with API's happens over http, xml & json, there are not client libraries to ease the integration. couple of libraries highlighted are

Ruby Client for REST api
https://github.com/ejholmes/restforce

Node.js REST api wrapper for force.com
https://github.com/kevinohara80/nforce

d3.js - to visualise & chart the data from analytics api
http://d3js.org/
example - https://medium.com/p/c87517ab52b1

Salesforce1
This is probably the biggest anouncement for developers this year... its a complete rebranding and futurisitc strategy to put the force.com platform as mobile first & api driven.. this is an umbreall of force.com, heroku and exact target and other supporting components put together. we now have a new developer site for the salesforce1 platform.. which has a good collection of documentation & other resources around the platform and api's..
http://developer.salesforce.com/

Mobile packs and Mobile SDK
these are already released in phases over the period and got a special mention in the keynote to hightlight how it fits in the Salesforce1 platform. the mobile packs covers the development with existing client side web technologies like HTML5 with javascript libraries like Angular, Knockout, jQuery, etc.. and the Mobile SDK covers the iOS and Android based development

Heroku Connect
if you have any of your apps running in heroku and interfaces with salesforce, then this will be a handy app to sync the data between your postgres database and salesforce data. you can create mapping between these 2 databases and enable syncing (uni directional or bi directional)

you can try heroku connect by logging in here
https://app.cloudconnect.com/

you can find more details on this here
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/11/19/tools-for-integrating-heroku-apps-with-salesforce

Demo Time
some of the cool stuff shown in the demo in keynote are

• Mobile Cards in page layouts
• creating a simple chart with analytics api, add it to object page layout, show it in mobile devices
• Enhanced Lookups in page layouts
• Flexi pages
• creating Quick actions (publisher actions) and using it in Salesforce1 mobile app

Finaly you can watch the developer keynote video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KELBWQIVcfk

will try to cover more on the Salesforce1 platform in future blog posts.. lets learn this together :-)