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Salesforce fired up a brand new developer conference today in San Francisco. Executives and developers mingled to discuss the various Salesforce platforms and products, the highlights of which focused on numerous buzzwords: IoT, AI, and cloud-based containers.
Alex Dayon, Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, detailed the platform’s features, particularly those for commercial mobile development. Customers like Dunkin Donuts, GM and Intuit were shown as examples of successful Salesforce-based mobile applications.
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Dayon also intimated that the future of the Salesforce platform will be heavily focused on AI. As proof, he cited Salesforce’s 2016 AI and machine learning acquisitions: MetaMind, Implisit and PredictionIO. It also purchased MinHash and Tempo AI, both machine learning companies, last year.
Parker Harris, cofounder of Salesforce, said that developers have a lot of complexity to deal with today, thanks to multiple platform options. “You’ve got apps on your phone, you have iPhones, Android phones, watches, laptops; it’s crazy,” he said. “If you’re a developer, you have all these different development environments. That’s why I delivered Lightning.
“Lightning is about building once and running everywhere. We talk about Lightning as an app, as an experience, but what I love is Lightning as a platform. Code is great, but my mission since I started Salesforce…is to figure out how we can have less code. How can we make things more and more declarative?”
Harris described the benefits of the Lightning platform, such as that developers can offer their applications for sale on the Lightning marketplace. Harris then detailed some forthcoming changes to the platform.
“Today, you have to write a controller that accesses the data,” he said. “Now we give you Lighting Data Services to handle that for you.” He added that Lightning will, this fall, add more core components, app branding options, inline edits, global navigation, components testing, and mass actions for developers.
Adam Seligman, executive vice president at Salesforce, said that the Force.com platform will also receive new capabilities and tools this year. That platform will get a new debugger, more enhancements for the Force.com platform within the Eclipse IDE, and a compiler with support for partial compilation.