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Heroku
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service where you can deploy projects and websites. It supports several programming languages, so it’s no surprise that Heroku’s really popular.
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Heroku Connect: Event-driven Data Sync For Force.com
Heroku Connect synchronizes data in both directions between Salesforce (Force.com) and Heroku Postgres, but its original polling design trades simplicity and reliability for synchronization latency, wasted API calls, and unnecessary database queries. The post presents an event-driven alternative using the Force.com Streaming API and PostgreSQL’s LISTEN/NOTIFY system. For Salesforce, Heroku Connect automatically creates a PushTopic per synchronized table, subscribes with Node.js and NForce, and dispatches Redis tasks when notifications arrive. Those events act as change signals rather than complete data transfers: workers query the Force.com SOAP API because streaming has limitations and subscribers may miss events. On Postgres, PL/pgSQL trigger functions call pg_notify after DML, while node-postgres listens on named channels; the system supports added UPDATE and DELETE triggers, though triggers are still required.
Using force.com from your Heroku apps
Force.com and Heroku, both part of the Salesforce1 platform, can be connected from Heroku applications through data synchronization or direct API access. Heroku Connect provides point-and-click, two-way synchronization between Force.com and the Postgres database attached to an app, allowing reads and writes in Postgres while changes are copied asynchronously; that latency makes it unsuitable when an immediate Force.com response is required. For synchronous access, open-source client libraries cover Force.com’s SOAP, REST, Streaming, Bulk, and Metadata APIs across languages including Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python, Objective-C, and Go. The article maps libraries and packages to supported APIs, including restforce and salesforce_bulk for Ruby, nforce for Node.js, simple-salesforce for Python, mobile SDKs, and ForceCLI for scripting SOAP and Metadata operations.
Introducing the Heroku HTTP API Toolkit
Heroku is open sourcing the toolchain it uses to design, document, and consume HTTP APIs, covering a design guide, JSON Schema tooling, and generated Ruby and Go clients. The guide addresses versioning, resource structure, naming, serialization, errors, request IDs, pagination, and caching, while prmd can bootstrap schemas, verify completeness, and generate documentation. JSON Schemas also drive client generation through Heroics for Ruby and Schematic for Go, with examples showing access to the Heroku Platform API and generation from its schema. Heroku says the toolkit supports both user-facing and internal services, where shared schemas and generated documentation provide a common language for proposing APIs or changes and help align design practices.
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