Lightning Platform Fundamentals

Preface
Introducing the Force.com Platform
About the Sample Recruiting App
Reviewing Database Concepts
Building a Simple App
Enhancing the Simple App with Advanced Fields, Data Validation, and Page Layouts
Expanding the Simple App Using Relationships
Securing and Sharing Data
Collaborating with Chatter
Automating Business Processes
Analyzing Data with Reports and Dashboards
Moving Beyond Point-and-Click App Development
Introducing Mash-Ups and Web Services
Introducing Visualforce
Implementing the Candidate Map
Implementing the Mass Update Status Button
Learning More
Glossary
PDF

Newer Version Available

This content describes an older version of this product. View Latest

Introducing Mash-Ups and Web Services

If we revisit the requirements of our Recruiting app, we'll see that we still need to implement an interactive map that shows the locations of the candidates that have applied for a particular position. Clearly no such functionality is available by default in the platform, and we certainly don't have time to build our own mapping engine. Is this type of functionality even possible?

Of course it's possible! Because the Lightning platform runs on the Web, we can leverage the power of other websites to implement features that would never be available just through our platform alone. This means that with a little code, we can mash up our own recruiting data with an interactive map website, such as Google Maps, and place this functionality in our own app.

To implement a mash-up, we'll first need to understand a little about the technology that makes it possible: Web services. A Web service is the mechanism by which two applications that run on different platforms, that were written in different languages, and that are geographically remote from each other, can exchange data using the Internet. Web services makes data exchange between two such applications as straightforward as two processes exchanging data on a single computer.

The way that data is exchanged between two Web services is similar to the way data is exchanged between a Web browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer and a Web server. Just as a Web browser uses a common network protocol (HTTP over TCP/IP) to download HTML files hosted on a Web server, a Web service can also use this same network protocol to download data from another Web service. The key difference is the actual data that is sent and received—Web services use XML instead of HTML.

The online world has a vast array of Web services, many of which are free. For our Candidate Map feature, we'll utilize the Google Maps service, which let you easily embed interactive maps in your apps. If we can find a way to pass candidate addresses from our app to the Google Maps service, Google will take care of all the mapping functionality, saving us from worrying about how our app will render an interactive map. We'll just need to figure out how to pull that rendered map into our app.

The Lightning platform also has its own powerful Web services API, which includes the SOAP API. With the SOAP API, you can customize and integrate your Salesforce organization using the language and platform of your choice. The SOAP API defines a Web service that enables full, reliable access to all of the data in your organization, including the ability to read, create, update, and delete records.

Because the SOAP API is only used behind the scenes for our Candidate Map feature, this book does not go into detail about it; however, you can learn about it in the SOAP API Developer Guide, at www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/index.htm.

Note