Salesforce.com has launched its Facebook tool kit. And Facebook has a job listing for an application developer who will develop, integrate and maintain Force.com applications for business and external use.
The two pieces of news shine light on the relationship the two companies have formed. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is an unabashed fan of Facebook. Salesforce.com emulates the social network in its development.
The tool kit is an expected development. It’s a picture of how Salesforce.com is opening its API infrastructure to REST-based architectures. You can tell though that this is new territory for Salesforce.com. The tool kit is still in Beta. The Facebook Graph APIs return JSON. The JSON parser Salesforce.com is using is not as as efficient as Salesforce.com would like it to be. Further, the tool kit only supports read-only access. It will eventually support “write,” capabilities. Salesforce.com’s Quinton Wall writes in the blog post that the new tool kit is in GitHub for anyone who wants work on it.
Salesforce.com is keeping the beta label until the experience is improved.
Here’s what the tool kit includes:
- Auth 2.0 for authentication,
- REST API for interrogating the Facebook Social Graph
- Extended permissions
- Pagination
- JSON for data interchange
The news from Salesforce.com dovetails with Facebook’s job posting. Facebook has adopted Salesforce.com and is seeking a developer to oversee the development of Force.com applications for both external and internal purposes.
According to the job posting, Salesforce.com is looking for an application developer who can:
Provide Technical design, configuration, development and testing of Force.com custom applications, interfaces and reports
Model, analyze and develop or extend persistent database structures which are non-intrusive to the base application code and which effectively and efficiently implement business requirements
Integrate force.com applications to other facebook external or internal Business Applications and tools
Develop UI and ACL tailored to facebook employees and suppliers
The news from both companies are based upon the demand for the Force.com platform with employees, customers and third parties. Each represent investments that the companies are making to draw interest from a developer community making apps for the enterprise.
It shows the value Salesforce.com places on the experience that it wants to provide customers. And for Facebook it opens a new window for the reach of its service and integration with the modern enterprise.
