Hi,

I'm new to development with Salesforce. I've developed Web applications for 15 years, having done both backends and frontends, recently with Ruby on Rails.

At my current position, I'm working with a boss who has strong connections with Salesforce, so naturally, he wants our new Web app to ditch PostgreSQL and exclusively use Database.com instead, not just have two databases sync with each other.

After some reading last weekend, I stumbled upon an old gem that no longer has active support (but is still maintained in some forks on GitHub), that is applied on top of Active Record. This sound ideal, but I'm worried about the lack of central support for its development and maintenance.

I also noticed Heroku's "databasecom" and "databasecom-rails" gems, which completely discards Active Record, and tries to take its place. I'm glad to find software that is actively maintained.

However, the first sight of discarding the well-built and proved Active Record sounds completely idiotic.

How do you handle validation? How can you add methods to your models? How can you write automated tests for your models (with RSpec) and features (with Capybara)? There are many questions, along with many potential problems, that come to mind.

So far, the answers I get are rare, and they're not satisfactory. The first come that I heard, about validation, is "you simply just do it all client-side". You mean I just let everyone with JavaScript turned off put whatever they want in our database?

Is there something I'm not getting? Up to this point, I've yet to stumble upon documentation or examples that will shed light on my lack of knowledge of Salesforce. If you have anything that can show me the way, it would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.