11. Advanced Integration

This chapter focuses on Force.com integration features that are highly specialized and not typically essential for everyday application development. They are features often used by independent software vendors to extend the Force.com platform at a low level to add new capabilities.

Due to their specialized nature and complexity, the APIs covered here each have their own dedicated reference guides at http://developer.force.com. The intent of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to the APIs and sample code that can serve as a way to get started with them.

This chapter is divided into sections that each address a different integration feature:

Introduction to the Force.com Streaming API—The Streaming API provides near-real-time notifications about the creation and modification of database records.

Working with the Force.com Bulk API—The Bulk API is a way to get mass quantities of database records in and out of Force.com.

Getting started with Force.com Canvas—Canvas provides a secure mechanism to embed user interfaces, hosted outside Force.com, into Chatter and Visualforce pages.

Introduction to the Force.com Tooling API—The Tooling API is used by the Force.com IDE and other tools to maintain code artifacts and access debugging functionality.

Understanding the Force.com Metadata API—The Metadata API enables you to write code to perform development and configuration management tasks such as database object maintenance and application migration. It is the same API used by the Force.com IDE.

Sample application—In an integration scenario for the Services Manager sample application, a Java program is developed to update Force.com with information from a human resources database.