Improved Browser Testing on Heroku with Chrome

engineering Last Updated: , Software Engineering Architect

For developers and businesses offering a web-based product, automated browser testing is a critical tool to ensure continuous delivery of a reliable service. Developers write browser tests by scripting actions against a real browser, simulating real usage by navigating, selecting, and making assertions about web pages and their document elements.

In this post, we introduce a new community buildpack that helps with automated browser testing. The new buildpack resolves installation reliability problems in the existing Chrome browser buildpacks for Heroku apps.

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Reactive Programming with Salesforce Data

engineering Last Updated: , Software Engineering Architect

The recent introduction of Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) in Salesforce has launched us into a new age of integration capabilities. Today, it's possible to develop custom apps that respond to activity in Salesforce. Whether you're creating a memorable customer interaction or implementing an internal workflow for employees, consider an event-sourced design to improve responsiveness and durability of the app.

In this article, we'll look at an event-sourced app architecture that consumes the Salesforce Streaming API using the elegant jsforce JavaScript library in a Node app on Heroku.

Streaming with jsforce

In summer 2018, the open-source jsforce library...

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Introducing the Einstein Vision Add-on for Image Recognition

news Last Updated: , Software Engineering Architect

UPDATE: As of July 31, 2023, Salesforce no longer offers the Object Detection and Image Classification APIs. This means those APIs are no longer available. As a result, the demo app and the Einstein Vision add-on are no longer available.

The most innovative apps augment our human senses, intuition, and logic with machine learning. Deep learning, modelled after the neural networks of the human brain, continues to grow as one of the most powerful types of machine learning. When applied to images, deep learning enables powerful computer vision features like visual search, product identification, and brand detection.

Today, we bring you the Einstein Vision add-on (beta), allowing Heroku...

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Deploying React with Zero Configuration

news Last Updated: , Software Engineering Architect

So you want to build an app with React? "Getting started" is easy… and then what?

React is a library for building user interfaces, which comprise only one part of an app. Deciding on all the other parts — styles, routers, npm modules, ES6 code, bundling and more — and then figuring out how to use them is a drain on developers. This has become known as javascript fatigue. Despite this complexity, usage of React continues to grow.

The community answers this challenge by sharing boilerplates. These boilerplates reveal the profusion of architectural choices developers must make. That official "Getting Started" seems so far away from the reality of an operational app.

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