Executive Summary:
Techfino's SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) eBook guides NetSuite developers and administrators through the platform's most significant DevOps upgrade in years. Covering SDF fundamentals, migration from legacy deployment tools, source control integration, and CI/CD best practices, this resource distills Techfino's early adoption experience across complex client implementations into a practical reference for the NetSuite developer community.
Techfino is proud to finally introduce our SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) eBook to the NetSuite Community! Our entire development team is pumped up about the latest features and enhancements to the NetSuite platform as it relates to NetSuite’s biggest DEVOPS upgrade in several years. We have long been an ‘early adopter’ of SDF as a change management tool and we wanted to share some of the lessons learned to help other developers and customers get up to speed on this new technology. We have included a step-by-step guide on how to configure the SDF and Eclipse plug-in, as well as a “Hello World!” SDF project example to get started.
Editor's note: We published this eBook in August 2019, and its setup steps use the SuiteCloud IDE Plug-in for Eclipse, which has had no new releases since NetSuite 2022.2. For new SDF projects, NetSuite recommends moving to the SuiteCloud Extension for Visual Studio Code or the SuiteCloud CLI for Node.js.
Why You Should Use SDF
Before the advent of SDF, you could only maintain version control for source code files, which created a pretty significant Change Management nightmare. However, with SDF you can now maintain version control for so much more, including script deployments, workflows, custom records, and many of the configuration objects that were previously only accessible via the user interface. You can now even roll-back configuration and source code changes to previous versions should you discover a major issue.
With SDF, you don’t have to worry about duplicating fields unintentionally or handling different configurations between environments with extreme caution, as SDF handles all of this for you.
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SDF Gotchas & Limitations
It’s tempting to want to version everything such as scripts, workflows, saved searches, and custom fields. Up until now, this could only be migrated either via SuiteBundler or manually re-created. In the process of writing this eBook, we discovered a number of bugs that we had to spend considerable time working through over the past several months. We have included a list of the common challenges and pitfalls that you’ll want to consider before jumping into SDF on your next project. We have to give credit to the NetSuite product team though because a large number of these issues have fortunately been resolved before our publishing.
In summary, we hope that you will find our eBook as a valuable resource to either jumpstart your journey into SDF or to learn more about the latest DEVOPS development tool. It is a great tool aimed directly at helping developers focus on writing more code and spending less time performing tedious manual deployments that take time to perform and fully validate.
If you are thinking about upgrading your in-house NetSuite Build Deployment and DEVOPS processes to take advantage of the latest that SDF has to offer, then feel free to reach out to us with your questions and find out how we can help.
