A lot has been told since the first announcement from Salesforce, some months ago, about S-controls being “desupported” sometime after January 2010. The exact words used by Salesforce in the Spring ’09 Release Notes was “Visualforce pages are considered the next-generation of S-controls and should be used instead of S-controls whenever possible, both for the increased performance and the ease with which they can be written. In addition, S-controls will be desupported in a future release”.

This announcement was problematic at first, due the vague the above words were (what exactly “discontinue the support for S-controls” meant? when and why will this happen?) and also because the legitimate worry from several Companies which have invested thousands and thousands of dollars on S-controls development. A clarification made by Salesforce and a correction made to the Release notes later, helped to relieve the tension, at least for some Companies. The final version of the announcement was:

“Visualforce pages are considered the next-generation of S-controls and should be used instead of S-controls whenever possible, both for their increased performance and the ease with which they can be written. Caution: S-controls have been superseded by Visualforce pages. Salesforce will, sometime after January 2010, remove the ability to create and distribute new S-controls. Existing S-controls will be unaffected.”

The above was a relieve for many Companies whom have hired professional services to develop S-controls’ based solutions on their Salesforce’s accounts, because at least current ones will still work, so they should not need to migrate their solutions to VisualForce. However, other questions arise:

• What will happen with the Companies whom have built products, using S-controls?
• May packages containing S-controls be installed on new customers accounts?
• Since there will not be support from Salesforce for S-controls in the future, what will happen if a new Salesforce functionality breaks an existing S-control?

I think if you’re asking yourself the above questions, you probably belong to the group of Companies that has designed Salesforce.com solutions for other Companies and Customers, using S-controls and you are planning to continue distributing these solutions to new Customers.

Unfortunately the above questions doesn’t have a clear answer from Salesforce so far and based on the response some Companies are “unofficially” getting from even the Salesforce Customer Service, most of the Companies are deciding to migrate their solutions to VisualForce.

The good news is that Visualforce has proved a solution ahead S-controls, regarding both to its performance and to its scalability. The main reasons are two:

1. Visualforce run on the server, while S-controls run on the client’s browsers. Meaning: Visualforce delegates all the heavy lifting to Salesforce’s servers and you avoid sending a lot of data (unnecessary) back and forward between Salesforce and the clients’ browser. For example, some Customers have reported 3x performance improvements with functional equivalence.
2. S-controls were a scripting language (just javascript, with the support of some libraries and toolkits), while Visualforce is a way better technology, designed by layers, but still ease to use in most cases.

So, even when you probably didn’t ask for it, at least you are being pushed forward to a better Technology. The bottom line is: if you have a small-medium S-control custom solution built in your Organization and you’re not making any plans in the near future to extend its functionality, you’ll probably be fine for a while. In the other hand, my recommendation for anything beyond that is to migrate your solution to Visualforce, whether by doing it yourself (if you have the qualified resources) or hiring professional services.

Héctor Pappe
Teravision Technologies
Please send comments to hpappe@teravisiontech.com