Salesforce.com

Broadly speaking there are two types of integrations with Salesforce, either a system-to-system integration or a user interface integration. One of the primary ways to do these integrations is by using the Salesforce REST API. When using the Salesforce REST API you need to obtain an access token that identifies who is making the requests. OAuth 2 provides an HTTP interface to obtain a Salesforce access token.

When using the Salesforce OAuth 2 API there are three options for obtaining an access token:

While sometimes unfortunate it is often necessary to have data silos that share data. The Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) pattern has been around for a long time to address this need and there are tons of solutions out there. If you just need a quick and easy way to copy new & updated records in Salesforce to an external data source, a simple Heroku app and Salesforce Workflow might be the quickest and easiest solution. I’ve put together a sample Node.js application for this: https://github.com/jamesward/salesforce-etl-mysql

I’ve built a little web-based tool called ForceNPM that makes it super easy to add NPM packages to Salesforce. Check it out:

Give ForceNPM a try!

The code is on GitHub so if you’d like to deploy this on your own Heroku app or other infrastructure, you can do that. Let me know how it goes!

This weekend I’m at the Go Code Colorado Challenge Weekend event in Durango. The purpose of Go Code Colorado 2016 is for teams to build something useful for businesses using one or more of the Colorado Public Datasets. Some teams are using Salesforce for the back-office / business process side of the app they are building. So I decided to see if I could pull a Colorado Public Dataset into Salesforce. Turns out it’s super easy! Just follow these steps:

Recently I blogged about a toolchain that quickly gets you going with the Salesforce REST APIs. I believe developers should be able to get started with new technologies without having to install tons of stuff and struggle for days. That blog used Quick Force Node for those who want to use JavaScript / Node.js. I’ve had a number of requests for a Java version of this toolchain so I created Quick Force Java.

When getting acquainted with new technologies I believe that users shouldn’t have to spend more than 15 minutes getting something simple up and running. I wanted to apply this idea to building an app on the Salesforce REST APIs so I built Quick Force (Node). In about 12 minutes you can deploy a Node.js app on Heroku that uses the Salesforce REST APIs, setup OAuth, then pull the app down to your local machine, make and test changes, and then redeploy those changes. Check out a video walkthrough:

This year at Dreamforce I presented a session that walked through a few of the ways to integrate Heroku apps with Salesforce. Here is the session description:

Combining customer-facing apps on Heroku with employee-facing apps on Salesforce enables a whole new generation of connected and intelligent experiences. There are four primary ways to do this integration: Heroku Connect, Canvas, Apex / Process Callouts, and the Salesforce REST APIs. Using code and architectural examples, we’ll walk through these different methods. You will walk away knowing when you should use each and how to use them.

Salesforce provides a variety of different ways to integrate external apps into the Salesforce UI. Canvas is an iframe-based approach for loading externally hosted UIs into pages on Salesforce. The nice thing about Canvas versus a plain iframe is that Canvas has a JavaScript bridge which enables secure communication between the external iframe and Salesforce. This communication happens in the context of the Salesforce user and doesn’t require the typical OAuth handshake. Because Canvas apps live outside of Salesforce they can be built with any language and run anywhere, including Heroku.

The typical method of adding JavaScript and CSS libraries (e.g. jQuery, Bootstrap, and AngularJS) to Salesforce environments is to locate a library’s download, download it, then upload it to Salesforce, then figure out the structure of the files so that you can use them from Visualforce. Using WebJars as a basis, I’ve created an easy way to add libraries to Salesforce, called Force WebJars.

Here is a quick demo:

Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

Dreamforce 2014 is quickly approaching and this year is going to be amazing! I’ll be presenting a few sessions and helping at the $1 Million Hackathon. Here are my sessions:

• Integrating Clouds & Humans with the Salesforce Wear Developer Packs

  As smart watches and other human-integrated devices make their way into the mainstream, developers will need to quickly ramp up to these new paradigms and interaction models. Integrating these new wearable devices with Salesforce connects users to their businesses and customers in new ways. Join us as we use code and examples to dive into the architecture and patterns for developing wearable Salesforce apps with the Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Android Wear.