A quick glance at most any phone shows the importance and urgency – for businesses of all kinds – of creating mobile customer apps. Our everyday activities – finding a ride, ordering a meal or turning on a light are increasingly mobile experiences.

But delivering a great omnichannel experience to customers requires more than just the work of the application developer. The larger organization is involved in following up with prospects, fielding service inquiries, and sending relevant marketing messages. Orchestrating this tapestry of touchpoints often requires developers to integrate with systems used by non-developers, including sales, service, marketing and community management systems....

With the Salesforce hackathon fast approaching, I wanted to give a quick overview on building apps that use the force.com APIs (part of the Salesforce1 platform).

The force APIs are rich and varied, so sometimes just getting started can seem a little daunting.

In May we released the first version of Heroku Connect, a service that makes it easy to build Heroku apps that share data with your Salesforce deployment.

Today we released our first major update to the service, bringing new speed and scale enhancements to all Heroku Connect users. Together, these enhancements lower latency on Heroku Connect synchronization, provide developers with more granular controls and improve insight into their Force.com API utilization.

Event Driven Synchronization from Force.com to Heroku Postgres

One of the top requests from the first Heroku Connect customers was to reduce the latency of synchronization between Force.com and Heroku Postgres. With this...

Heroku Connect is a service offered by Heroku which performs 2-way data synchronization between force.com and a Heroku Postgres database.

When we first built Heroku Connect, we decided to use polling to determine when data had changed on either side. Polling isn't pretty, but its simple and reliable, and those are "top line" features for Heroku Connect. But polling incurs two significant costs: high latency and wasted resources. The more you poll the more you waste API calls and database queries checking when there are no data changes. But if you lengthen your polling interval then you grow the latency for the data synchronization.

Force.com and Heroku are both part of the Salesforce1 platform. There are lots of great ways to leverage force.com from your Heroku app. This article will give an overview and pointers to get you started.