Enterprise businesses have complex needs involving many human, device, and increasingly, machine interactions, often distributed across the globe. Allowing them to work together in an efficient and secure manner is no easy task, and as such, it is no great surprise that utilizing cloud-based software over the internet has become so popular. High-grade security, scalability, and availability is high on checklists when choosing a new application, often followed by API needs and the ability to customize.
By developing on the Lightning Platform, your application already has a good start. http://trust.salesforce.com/ provides a wide selection of industry strength, compliance, and encryption standards that are equally applicable to your applications. With this comes a selection of standard APIs offered in the SOAP and REST forms, as well as the ability to create your own application APIs. We will also start to discuss platform events in this chapter, and with that comes a number of APIs and tools for data streaming. In my view, there is not a more integration-ready cloud platform available today than the Lightning Platform. This is further extended by Salesforce's general-purpose integration platform known as MuleSoft; something we will discuss in further detail in this chapter as well.
In this chapter, we will review the integration and extensibility options provided as standard on the platform and how your application can get the most from them, in addition to developing custom application APIs. Once again, the application enterprise patterns will come into play, supporting the need for APIs and UIs to have strong functionality parity through the use of the Domain and Service layers described in earlier chapters.
This chapter will cover the following topics:
- Reviewing integration and extensibility needs
- Understanding the Lightning Platform APIs for integration
- Understanding application-specific APIs
- Understanding the implications of the OpenAPI Specification and Swagger
- Alignment with the Lightning Platform's extensibility features
- Extending application logic with Apex interfaces
- Additional integration tools and products, such as MuleSoft