Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud, Third Edition

Data Integration

Integration refers to the incorporation of the database into the rest of your application, the business logic, and the user interface. If your application consists solely of stored procedures, there is no integration; your code runs inside the database process and hits database objects directly. More commonly, there are application servers that need to communicate with the database.

With Force.com, either you are coding “on the platform,” which is akin to writing stored procedures, or you are developing a “composite application,” which executes somewhere else but integrates with Force.com data and logic. The following subsections describe how integrating data in Force.com differs from traditional Web application development. ...