Salesforce launches its Web-based IDE in Beta

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Two years ago (in June 2020), Salesforce bustled with the announcement of Code Builder, an IDE (web-based integrated development environment) modeled after GitHub Code spaces. In a blog post, Salesforce hastily introduced the beta for Code Builder, which the Company describes as having evolved into “a development environment optimized for Salesforce.”

What is Code Builder?

Powered by Amazon Web Services, Code Builder allows developers to launch an IDE in their browser from their Salesforce organization. Code Builder offers support for Salesforce frameworks and comes with preinstalled tools, including Salesforce Extension.

Certainly, Code Builder works well with Salesforce-developed programming languages, including Lightning Web Components and Apex, offering to autocomplete options for all of them. (Apex is generally used to build SaaS apps on top of Salesforce’s CRM channels, while Lightning Web Components are customized web elements created using JavaScript and HTML ). With the help of IDE, developers can test and deploy changes to Lightning Web Components & Apex web classes. They can run and develop a Salesforce Object Query Language to search an organization’s Salesforce data for precise information.

“Code Builder comes with the same set of extensions as in the Salesforce Extensions pack for Visual Studio Code, and the look and feel is similar to the Visual Studio Code User Interface,” Mohith Shrivastava, lead developer advocate at Salesforce, said in the previous blog post.”

Here are a few alarming conditions before you give it a try to Code Builder:

Salesforce limits usage to 20 hours for a maximum of 30 days for the beta period. To be saved, modifications must be deployed to an organization or committed to source control. Salesforce does not assure that Code Builder environments won’t get deleted without an alert, and it says it’ll remove all beta environments sometime before Code Builder reaches expected availability.

The Company is firmly assured on the note that Salesforce is not transitioning away from desktop IDEs. “Our strategy is to have one set of IDE extensions that customers can access from either [Microsoft Visual Studio Code] or Code Builder,” Shrivastava continued. “Hence, we will continue to build and maintain the Salesforce Extensions pack to support both VS Code on desktop and Code Builder in the browser.

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