Why we, Rubyists, care about Salesforce-Heroku?
Everybody might have heard in our Ruby/Rails technosphere that recently, the successful company Salesforce.com, famous for his platform, his growth and his position as the first huge Cloud business oriented app, has bought the tiny and innovative Heroku Platform.
I am not going to give an introduction about what those two key cloud actors do. You have to know that already. I am here to explain why the CRM market leader decided to buy our underground Ruby on-demand hosting platform and why that matter for us.
Ruby is trendy:
Since years now, the web ecosystem is driven by the Rails community. Creative, active and efficient, Rails approach has been spread as a major epidemic and has inoculated Ruby OO flexibility and Rails efficiency to well-settled language like PHP or Java. Ruby community is amazingly active. Coders are passionated and produce a living and elegant code base making Ruby/Rails and all Ruby librairies a relevant option in most of the situation.
Heroku is trendy:
Bored by deploying complicated to manage Web app, the Ruby community has quickly adopted the Heroku Cloud solution. As simple as a adding gem, hosting an app with Heroku let you create a Virtual Slice of cloud using an Heroku command. Your application is up and running in 3mn and ready to scale on-demand. Thousands of applications have been launched in few months and today they are close to 100.000 applications hosted on their platform.
Salesforce.com want to stay trendy and need our Love:
After years of succes and growth, Salesforce turned from a simple online web app into a sophisticated corporate platform. With two languages, Apex and VisualForce, a PaaS (Platform as a Service), Force.com and thousand of app in it’s eco-system, Salesforce proved years after years its ability to innovate. Last evolution concern for example the launch of Chatter to address social and mobile usages. Now that 3 millions users are connected daily to Salesforce and used to manage their lead pipe with it, an obvious and growing need of interaction with external apps appeared. Of course, Salesforce API provide almost all informations about your leads,account, contacts etc but the SF Data consumers, marketing people, want to create, almost on the fly, Data visualization and analytic tools. Sales pipeline optimization, Lead generation, or Lead nurturing, progressive and automated qualification are some of the hot topics for external Salesforce Application. Of course, Cloud app like Eloqua bring really innovatives and well SF integrated solutions for those points. Nevertheless small and fast businesses require some specific integration of Salesforce to their own product that can only be accomplished using external developments.
Here we go, Rubyists!!
Check that:
- Salesforce Data model is Object Oriented as our daily ActiveRecord ORM is in Rails. Lead.first.address is a valid Salesforce command.
- Salesforces Data Model is totally exposed on its API and can be consumed easily using ActiveRessource.
- Salesforce will be soon more integrated with Heroku (I guess)
- Salesforce market is customer centric and think as we do
Based on that, we can put to good use our demonstrated skills to build Web/Mobile apps. We have a new playground to express our ideas and conquer new market.
Nice to read about Salesforce and Heroku: