JSforce version 1.5 has been released which includes several important updates. The release of 1.5 had been planned to be just after the release of Summer '15, but delayed almost 2 months because I couldn't share the time to check all issues related to the release. Sorry for the delay to everyone who longly anticipated.

Features

The table of release contents is here, but I'd like to pick up some features which become available in 1.5.

If you are developing an app on Lightning framework of Salesforce, you may know that the framework has $A.enqueueAction() method call to invoke server-side Apex.

As the name suggests, it does not send the request to the server immediately - it queues the request instead and bundle all requests queued during certain time period.

This mechanism is called "Boxcarred Action" - the salesforce.com evangelist Peter Chittum's blog.

In order to query the data stored in Salesforce, a query language named SOQL is used generally. As Salesforce opens REST/SOAP API endpoint access, we can send the SOQL message in the API request.

This API can also be used when you are developing HTML5, Single Page Application(SPA). You might have to care about Same Origin Policy and Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) setting if the app resides outside of Salesforce, but not applied to the case when the app is served on Visualforce Page.

Gulp.js is a simple task/build runner to process front-end stuff, which utilizes pipes for streaming data that needs to be processed.

As gulp.js is running on Node.js, various Node.js-based packages - including JSforce - can be used in build scripts.

In this article, we'll show how to deploy a force.com package using gulp, which can contain Force.com metadata objects like custom object/field definitions, Apex classes, Visualforce pages, or CSS/JavaScript/image files as static resource archive.

If you are already using JSforce, you may be aware of its REPL. If not, you are definitely spending time and spending in learning APIs.

JSforce REPL is an extension of Node.js REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop), which enables you to try and execute Salesforce APIs (REST, Bulk, Chatter, Metadata, and so on) in interactive manner.

I recently noticed that people are not fully utilizing features in the REPL. Here I would like to pick up some tips in JSforce REPL which I really think very useful.