APIs

The platform's metadata-driven development model allows app developers to quickly build a lot of functionality with tools provided by the platform; however, sometimes app developers want to modify the actual data in an app and use third-party services to create more customized app behaviors. To do this, they can use a number of APIs to integrate with the platform. The core set of APIs include Force.com SOAP API and REST API, the Bulk API, Streaming API, and Metadata API. You can call these APIs from a wide variety of client-side languages - and toolkits are also available to ease the integration. For more information, see “Which API Should I Use?” in the Salesforce Help.

Our APIs provide straightforward, powerful, and open ways to programmatically access the data and capabilities of any app running on the platform. They allow programmers to access and manipulate apps from any server location, using any programming language that supports Web services, like Java, PHP, C#, or .NET. For more information, see http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Integration.