Okay, I’m excited to announce the Integrating with the Force.com Platform article! Why? Well, because I had great fun learning about the various ways in which Force.com facilitates integration and writing about them.

For example:

• Callouts to external SOAP Web services – just slurp in the WSDL and generate.
• Expose Apex Code methods as external Web services – which auto-generates WSDL for your clients.
• The Force.com Web Services API – the über Web services API for your data, which magically updates as you add persistent objects etc. Lots of tooling is already built around this API.
• The very interesting Metadata API – giving you programmatic control of your programs – treating them as metadata.
• Email handlers in Apex – so that you can react to incoming email
• Email output – so that you can send email
• Outbound messaging – allowing you to send SOAP messages on data changes, usually triggered by workflow rules.
• HTTP support, and hence REST support
• and last, but not least, Force.com Sites (public pages can be a form of integration), and Force.com Sites Syndication Feeds (Atom goodness) – though you can only do these in Developer Edition accounts right now.

So what’s that? 9 I count. How many have you used? (I’m on 9 😉 )

And that’s not counting any of the tooling/toolkits built around these methods of integration. For example, the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs, Force.com for Google App Engine, Force.com for Amazon Web Services, and Force.com for Facebook.

Let me know if I’ve left any out, and I hope you find the article useful!