SOURCE: All credit to my information source: Sonny Cloward (@sonnycloward), Steve Anderson (@gokubi), David Schach (@dschach) and the Non-Profit Salesforce Salesforce Practioners Google Group.
Salesforce.com plans to discontinue support for S-Controls next year. The following warning announcement is displayed to Salesforce.com Administrators in the App Setup -> Develop -> S-Controls page:
"S-controls have been superseded by Visualforce pages.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. For more information, see How Do Visualforce Pages Compare to S-Controls?."
The “end of life” date on S-Controls is a little vague, I suspect intentionally. Sometime after January 2010 could mean anytime that year, or any time in the following decade.
The announcement is problematic for some Developers. While VisualForce and Apex are great, there are certain governor limits of Apex that prohibit its use in every application. I have a couple S-Controls that I haven’t yet converted over to VF/Apex for this very reason. I have other S-Controls, admittedly, that I haven’t converted over for simply lack of time.
Note that existing S-Controls are unaffected. However, they can't be updated or distributed in packages after this EOL date. Developers must convert these S-Controls over to VisualForce pages. VisualForce allows developers to write javascript and HTML directly into their VisualForce pages, so it should be possible to simply copy / paste existing S-Controls into a VisualForce page. That means this end-of-life shouldn’t be much of an issue to most savvy Salesforce Developers.
On the other hand, I find that a lot of Customers don’t have in-house developer expertise. Their S-Controls are either part of an application they downloaded from the AppExchange, or were developed by a contractor. If you don’t have developers in-house, don’t panic! You’ve got plenty of time to inventory your S-Controls over the next few months. Evaluate these components. Are they crucial to your application? Are they likely to require change / updates? If yes, invest the time now into learning VisualForce (so you can convert them yourself) or contact your certified Salesforce.com partner / contractor / consultant.
Have any questions? Reply below!
You'll be able update existing s-control, just not create new ones.
ReplyDeleteUpdated information about S-Control deprecation can be found here:
ReplyDeletehttp://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/S-Control_Deprecation
-->You can't create new s-controls .
ReplyDelete---->You can distribute old s-controls in a package.
---> You can't deploy s-controls using force.com IDE.
You can edit existing s-controls.I am not sure about compilation of old s-controls document is not clear.