10. Integration with Force.com

The Force.com platform offers various features to integrate its data and processes with those of other applications. These features are leveraged by independent software vendors as part of stand-alone integration products and also exposed to developers and system administrators of Force.com. This chapter describes the integration features that can bridge Force.com with other applications.

Force.com integration features leverage the Web standards of REST and SOAP to send and receive data over HTTP. REST stands for Representational State Transfer, a common form of Web-accessible API. SOAP is an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol. These standards can be used to communicate with Force.com bidirectionally, meaning you can call into and out of Force.com with them.

This chapter is divided into the following sections:

Apex callouts—Initiate requests to systems on the Web via REST and SOAP directly from inside your Apex code.

Calling into Force.com using REST—With the Force.com REST API, you can access Force.com data and logic using a REST-style interface.

Calling into Force.com using SOAP—Learn how to use the Enterprise API to make the data objects and Apex code in your organization available outside of Force.com.

Sample application—Walk through an integration scenario with the Services Manager sample application, extending it to calculate and transmit corporate performance metrics to a fictional industry-benchmarking organization.