Are you building SaaS applications? In this post we give you a preview of a session next week on developing apps using Force.com and Heroku. At Dreamforce, partners and customers are going to show how they are building their business in the cloud and how you can too. As a developer you’ll typically consider one of three options for an app:
– build it on Force.com
– build it on Heroku
– build it using Force.com and Heroku together
A glance at Skedulo’s use of Force.com and Heroku
Many customers and ISV apps have existing data that resides in Salesforce as well as objects that have been relationally defined in a Force.com environment. Extending the app with Heroku can add new functionality while utilizing OAuth for authorization. Check out this Dev Center article by Jon Mountjoy and the technical implementation by Tom Maher on how to get this done. Another reason why ISVs like Heroku is because of scalable computing power via dynos. New Energy runs a real-time pricing rules engine using Heroku as the computational process of a Force.com app. With Heroku you can use standard programming languages like Java, Ruby, Python, Node.js and Scala and a wide choice of databases. This week we released the second iteration of our flagship Postgres database-as-a-service. You can also run specialty databases through Heroku add-ons. They include relational, non-relational and Hadoop/Big Data products. Heroku add-ons are more than specialty databases. They represent over 100 cloud services that allow you to extend your app with a single command. Enable search, logging, email, video encoding, caching, analytics, monitoring, payments. Build mobile apps in a breeze. Together with Force.com and recently ExactTarget, Heroku unbounds your creativity. As a developer you use familiar tools and can experiment at will. Use clean methodologies, fork your codebase, fork your database, iterate or rollback.
Galigeo app architecture
When to use which technology? Come and meet the team and two ISVs, Skedulo and Galigeo, for a technical discussion. We are hosting the session next Tuesday, November 19th: 04:00 pm – 05:00 pm – Moscone Center West – 3016. You can pre-check here. Don’t forget the partner keynote, the $1M hackathon and see you at Dreamforce.