It’s an exciting time to be an Apex developer – as always.

You may have read the news about the alliance between Google
and Salesforce.  With this alliance, every Salesforce user now
has a tool to work with Google AdWords. 

As a developer, you probably want to go deeper than simply using
the new Salesforce functionality – you probably want to discover ways to create
your own interactions with Google Data, such as synchronizing information
between data in Salesforce and some of the Google Apps. 

Ron Hess has written a piece
that explains how to put Salesforce Events onto a Google Calendar, as well as
pointing the way to keeping the events synchronized.  Ron’s article includes a link to sample code.

The key feature that makes this integration possible is the
AJAX Proxy, a portion of Salesforce SOA. The Proxy addresses the core issue of integrating information from
different domains in a single page.  Even
if you are not interested in working with Google data now, this article gives a
clear explanation of how and why the AJAX Proxy is important.

Although you won’t be able to run the sample code in your
organization until July, 2007, you can get a jump start on your
Salesforce/Google interactions, as well as learning about using the AJAX Proxy,
with Ron’s article.