Generators, APEX, and Unix commands, OH MY!

This is a grab bag of tools and commands I kept coming back to while building Salesforce-backed web apps. It’s part cheat sheet, part “things worth bookmarking”.

Generators and scaffolding tools

• Slush is a Yeoman-style scaffolding tool built on Gulp (a “streaming build system”).
• Yeoman is the classic generator ecosystem that a lot of front-end workflows grew up around.
• If you want a batteries-included starter (especially from the mid-2010s era), generator-angular-fullstack was a standout: it scaffolds a MEAN-style web app (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node).
  • Background: MEAN

A few Unix commands that pay rent

• ln: create links (including symbolic links), which can be handy for wiring tooling together.
• cat: print a file to stdout (great for quick inspection and piping).
• pwd: show your current working directory (full path).

Salesforce (APEX) note: @RemoteAction

• @RemoteAction is one way to expose server-side Apex methods to JavaScript via Visualforce remoting (i.e., call into Apex from client-side JS).

Seeing your project shape

• tree prints a nice directory structure view (useful for debugging build outputs and deployment packaging).

More reading

• Official Salesforce resources for AngularJS development