Salesforce.com Releases Google Data Toolkit for Apex developers

Monday, June 23, 2008 at 7:33 AM

Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google Data APIs Team

Salesforce.com just released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform, enabling access to the full suite of Google Data APIs using Apex code.

The Toolkit currently includes high level methods for working with many of our popular APIs:

  • Contacts Data API
  • Calendar Data API
  • Spreadsheets Data API
  • Documents List Data API
  • Blogger Data API

With the Toolkit, developers can easily integrate their Force.com applications with Google Apps, extending our partnership with the team at salesforce.com to provide tighter integration of the two platforms.

While the previous salesforce.com <--> Google Data APIs integrations we've blogged about have involved client-side code, the new Toolkit enables server-to-server communication between the Force.com platform and your favorite Google Data APIs. This enables you to take advantage of the Force.com IDE and provides greater reliability for your requests. The salesforce.com team has also done a lot of work to make it easy to use the AuthSub authentication mechanism from within the Force.com platform, as they spoke about recently at Google I/O.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the salesforce.com announcement is that the team has chosen to make the project entirely open-source under the BSD license and host it on code.google.com. As with the Google Data APIs client libraries published by Google and Zend, the salesforce.com team welcomes external contributions to their Toolkit.

CODA, a European Financial applications provider, has used this new library to build a prototype web application which enables an exchange of data between Google Spreadsheets and their CODA 2go financial application built on the Force.com platform. This application allows users to input data using the familiar Google Spreadsheets interface and transfer the data to the Force.com hosted application at the click of a button using a custom Spreadsheets Gadget.

I look forward to seeing all the great integrations you build using this new client library and Google Data APIs. The Google Solutions Marketplace and the salesforce.com AppExchange are available to list your applications for the world to see.

To get started:

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