Salesforce.com is to give programmers the functionality
to link its on-demand applications to improve the sharing of data
between different programs and business processes.
The company provides
customer relationship management (CRM) software as a service over
the internet, which can reduce hardware costs for user
companies. However, most business processes that use software -
such as processing a purchase order from issue to delivery - can
require a much closer exchange of information between
applications.
In line with this, Salesforce SOA (Service Oriented
Architecture) will be a new capability of the
Apex programming language that will allow
developers to reuse software components and link data in a more
seamless manner.
"In the on-premise world, this would be pretty hard to implement
and costly, requiring code and perhaps a bit of hardware to manage
the workflow," said Clarence So, senior vice-president at
Salesforce.com.
Using Apex and Salesforce SOA, So said this
could be a 30 minute job for an Apex developer or Salesforce.com
system administrator, with all of the code running in
Salesforce.com's datacentres.
Salesforce.com said developers would be able to use the
programming language to do everything from creating custom
components, customising and modifying existing Salesforce.com code
and creating triggers, to building and executing complex business
logic and composite applications.
Gartner research vice-president John Radcliffe said
organisations should start planning how to rebalance their CRM
application portfolio to include composite applications and
orchestrated processes based on SOA.
"Although better business process orchestration will become the
major reason for adopting SOA, companies must consider the
management of software they have across business processes
currently, and data standardisation and master data management
between applications," he said.
The Salesforce SOA capability of Apex is scheduled to be
available as a developer preview in August, and it will be launched
with the complete version of Apex in December.
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