Moving from Java to Salesforce development - Good/Bad idea?

giveth

I'm a Java Developer with 10+ years experience, and looking to relocate from Dublin to another city in Ireland. An opportunity has come up in a big multinational to join a team doing Salesforce development. So this would involve working a lot with Apex (very like Java, but proprietary), Visualforce (HTML like), mixed in with industry standard things like Javascript, AngularJS, Bootstrap, REST web services, etc.

My worry is that there would be little or no actual Java in the new role, and that I may be restricting future career moves by becoming a Salesforce developer. As it is, I'm very familiar with Java and I can't imagine having any difficulty picking up and running with it in the future, but I'm worried that companies may not see it that way a few years down the line.

Would appreciate peoples opinions on this, and if anyone has made the move to Salesforce development.

Sheeps

giveth wrote: »

I'm a Java Developer with 10+ years experience, and looking to relocate from Dublin to another city in Ireland. An opportunity has come up in a big multinational to join a team doing Salesforce development. So this would involve working a lot with Apex (very like Java, but proprietary), Visualforce (HTML like), mixed in with industry standard things like Javascript, AngularJS, Bootstrap, REST web services, etc.

My worry is that there would be little or no actual Java in the new role, and that I may be restricting future career moves by becoming a Salesforce developer. As it is, I'm very familiar with Java and I can't imagine having any difficulty picking up and running with it in the future, but I'm worried that companies may not see it that way a few years down the line.

Would appreciate peoples opinions on this, and if anyone has made the move to Salesforce development.

Senior Java Engineer listed in the Indo two days ago as the hardest role in Ireland to fill.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/top-10-roles-hardest-to-fill-in-ireland-as-unemployment-rate-drops-to-postcrash-low-35412224.html

Not sure why you'd want to make a move to specialize in proprietary software when your what you do currently is in hot demand.

Talisman

Unless your intention is to become a SalesForce developer, don't even think about it. The backend is completely proprietary.

Apex is more akin to writing stored procedures - you can't do anything with it apart from interact with their platform. You don't write SQL to do data queries, instead you use SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language).

The front end skills would be transferable if you were to move on from the job. But the fact that the role involves AngularJS should also be a cause for concern. It you're not already familiar with the framework you may be wasting your time with it.

Some time ago one of the lead developers on the Angular team at Google said that Angular 1.x would continue to get support for 18-24 months after the release of Angular 2 (released September 2016). There has been a lot of AngularJS code written in the past 6 years and it's unlikely that all of it will be migrated so there will continue to be work for AngularJS developers. However, maintaining such code is likely to become a thankless and frustrating job given the inherent limitations of the framework.

SalesForce may well drop AngularJS in favour of another framework. Up until 4/5 years ago Sencha Ext JS was their framework of choice.

giveth

Thanks guys.
I've just done some more research in Salesforce development and came to the same conclusion. I won't be progressing with the opportunity.

InTheAttic

giveth wrote: »

I'm a Java Developer with 10+ years experience, and looking to relocate from Dublin to another city in Ireland. An opportunity has come up in a big multinational to join a team doing Salesforce development. So this would involve working a lot with Apex (very like Java, but proprietary), Visualforce (HTML like), mixed in with industry standard things like Javascript, AngularJS, Bootstrap, REST web services, etc.

My worry is that there would be little or no actual Java in the new role, and that I may be restricting future career moves by becoming a Salesforce developer. As it is, I'm very familiar with Java and I can't imagine having any difficulty picking up and running with it in the future, but I'm worried that companies may not see it that way a few years down the line.

Would appreciate peoples opinions on this, and if anyone has made the move to Salesforce development.

I totally disagree with the other answers here.

Isn't IT about trying new technologies and new roles? Why not try it for a year or two? You already have 10 years experience writing Java. With Visualforce you have opportunity to learn some front-end web technologies, one of which is in extremely high demand, javascript. You can find some extremely well paid contract roles writing Apex / Visual force. Not only that, but the SOAP API services for communicating with a Salesforce environment are written in Java, so for integration purposes, your Java will still come in useful.

Talisman

InTheAttic wrote: »

I totally disagree with the other answers here.

Isn't IT about trying new technologies and new roles? Why not try it for a year or two? You already have 10 years experience writing Java. With Visualforce you have opportunity to learn some front-end web technologies, one of which is in extremely high demand, javascript. You can find some extremely well paid contract roles writing Apex / Visual force. Not only that, but the SOAP API services for communicating with a Salesforce environment are written in Java, so for integration purposes, your Java will still come in useful.

AngularJS and JavaScript are not one and the same. In two years time, JavaScript will still be around, but AngularJS will not except in the case where people have to maintain legacy applications. AngularJS is 12-18 months away from reaching its end of life. Angular 2 was a complete rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible.

Angular 4 is scheduled for release in 2 weeks time, it uses TypeScript 2.1 which means there will be some incompatibilities with some Angular 2 code. Angular 5 is scheduled for release in September of this year and will use TypeScript 2.2 which means there are likely to be further breaking changes between the framework versions.

Salesforce are unlikely to adopt Angular yet on the basis that it is bleeding edge technology and code that their customers could write today may not work in 6-8 months time when the new version of the library appears and uses a new version of TypeScript.

The only reason to become a Salesforce developer is because you want to immerse yourself in their technology stack.

Colonel Panic

A technology stack which is terrible and tools that are even worse.