At our core, Heroku's goal is to make it easier for developers to build great apps. We do this by creating tools which allow developers to focus on writing code, rather than wasting time on managing infrastructure. To coincide with this week's Dreamforce event, we are launching several tools targeted at developers who write apps on Heroku that integrate with Salesforce.com.
If you aren't part of the Salesforce world, don't worry. We remain 100% committed to our core audience of web and mobile developers and will continue to release great new features and functionality like websockets and high-availability databases.
Force.com, a full stack platform for building employee-facing apps, provides a RESTful interface into Salesforce's sales, support, and marketing SaaS products. The three tools that we are launching today make it easier and more productive to build and connect to apps using Force.com. They are a Force.com CLI, Force.com Client Libraries for ruby and node.js, and Heroku Connect.
Force.com CLI
Previously, building Force.com apps required logging into Salesforce.com's web interface. But for developers who live on the command line, this can break flow. So we created the Force.com CLI. It allows you to interact directly with the data in Salesforce, in a lightweight and unobtrusive fashion:
$ force login matt@heroku.com
View the record types available:
$ force sobject list
Account
Campaign
Contact
Event
Group
Lead
Opportunity
Task
See information about a record type:
$ force field list Contact
AccountId: reference (Account)
AssistantName: string
AssistantPhone: phone
Birthdate: date
FirstName: string
LastName: string
Run a SOQL query:
$ force select id, name from user
Id | Name
--------------------+---------------
005i0000002DYYQBB4 | Bob Smith
--------------------+---------------
(1 records)
The Force CLI is open source and is available to download now.
Force.com Client Libraries
In addition to the CLI tool, we are releasing Force.com Client Libraries for Ruby and Node.js. These libraries are based on existing open source efforts and are available on github.
Install the force.com ruby gem:
$ gem install force
... or the Node.js library:
$ npm install force
Documentation on using the libraries is available on their Github pages.
Introducing Heroku Connect
Our final announcement for Dreamforce is Heroku Connect. It syncs data from Salesforce into Heroku Postgres automatically, handling many of the common issues of using an API such as local caching and conflict resolution. Because many application frameworks are optimized for using an SQL database (Rails, Django, etc), this makes it incredibly fast and easy to build apps that connect with Salesforce.
Heroku Connect is available as part of our Heroku1 edition and is in limited availability now. It be generally available in the first half of 2014. If you are interested in becoming and early customer, sign up here.
Come see us at Dreamforce
If you would like to learn more about Heroku1 or the Force.com tools, please visit us at Dreamforce this week. Herokai (Heroku employees) are stationed on the second floor of Moscone West at the Heroku Demo Station, Connected Devices Lab, and at the Hackathon.