One of the features of StrikeIron's IronCloud platform is that it can accept invocations of Web services via multiple protocols including both SOAP and REST. This maximizes the audience of potential users and provides for a good deal of flexibility with multiple IDEs, coding styles, and platform implementations.
In addition to the support for SOAP calls within the platform (including SOAP Headers, SOAP parameter-based authentication, and SOAP w/ HTTP Secure) there is also support for accepting REST calls. This is achieved within the “Transformation” sub-system of our IronCloud platform, meaning we translate the REST call to its equivalent SOAP call before hitting the actual Web service living within our data centers, and then translate the response back to the REST format before it is sent back to the calling entity, and of course all within milliseconds.
This is powerful because it allows any of our services to be integrated into Web scripting languages and other places where a REST call might be more appropriate or convenient, and opens up the functionality to Web developers who can quickly put this concept to use. These REST calls for example can easily be used within PHP, Python, Ruby, ColdFusion, JavaScript, Perl and even embedded into Java, .NET, and other IDE platforms, including anything that can utilize Representational State Transfer (REST). In other words, REST provides a nice interface for easy leveraging of functionality out in the Cloud.
Here is an example using REST with our North American Address Verification service, a Web API that validates the existence of any address in the United States or Canada, and then standardizes the address according to postal standards (as well as appending additional data such as county and latitude/longitude coordinates). The example below can be entered into any Web browser address line as-is (with the appropriate authentication - click the Free Trials button to the right or contact StrikeIron to get access) in order to get a response. You can then change parameter values for different addresses to get the different corresponding responses. You can also try other methods within any of our Web services following the same form (you have to change the parameters to match the method of course).
Form:
http://ws.strikeiron.com/NAAddressVerification6/NorthAmericanAddressVerificationService/NorthAmericanAddressVerification?LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.UserID=[UserID]&LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.Password=[Password]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine1=[AddressLine1]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine2=[AddressLine2]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.CityStateOrProvinceZIPOrPostalCode=[CityStateZip]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Country=[Country]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Casing=[Casing]
Example:
http://ws.strikeiron.com/NAAddressVerification6/NorthAmericanAddressVerificationService/NorthAmericanAddressVerification?LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.UserID=***********&LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.Password=******&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine1=15501 Weston Parkway&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine2=&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.CityStateOrProvinceZIPOrPostalCode=Cary NC&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Country=US&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Casing=UPPER
Because a REST call contains parameters including UserID and Password, we of course recommend to our users that these parameters be stored in a non-viewable config file and not the actual Web page source, or some other means of hiding credentials (within non-viewable code or within a database for example).
Have a REST-related question? Contact us at support@strikeiron.com Like a free trial? Contact us at info@strikeiron.com
Salesforce.com is holding its Dreamforce event this week in San Francisco, and its staggering run continues to show no signs of slowing. The conference is Salesforce's eighth and largest ever, with twenty-two thousand attendees. Salesforce and its CRM "Sales Cloud" has always been one of the poster-children for SAAS, and is now riding the Cloud wave higher and higher. It was a product offering originally geared towards SMBs with minimal IT staff but now has penetrated companies of all sizes with its annual revenue run rate of $1.7 billion USD.
The use of the product at large companies is a clear signal. It was very telling during the keynote that half of the enormous audience raised their hands when Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, asked how many in the keynote hall were from companies with 1000 or more employees. This is solid evidence that SAAS, and the Cloud, or at least the Salesforce.com version of the Cloud, has arrived emphatically in the enterprise and is growing there at great speed.
Salesforce has not only been a success for the company itself, but also for its hundreds of technology and product partners, many of which are at the expo with booths (including StrikeIron). Many of these partners have fared well providing add-on capabilities (like our native, Force.com data verification/quality services for Salesforce) to the core CRM and related-product suite. For example, there has been an 82% increase of application installs from the partner AppExchange this year versus the same time last year, nearly doubling the usage of partner applications and add-ons.
Some other feathers in the Salesforce cap:
In addition to its recent nine-figure acquisition of Jigsaw (a giant, crowd-sourced database of business cards), a $212M+stock acquistion of Heroku, a Ruby-based platform-as-a-service play was announced this morning.
Also:
- Salesforce's Chatter product was named as one of eWeek's "products of the year".
- The stock price (NYSE:CRM) has doubled in the past year.
- They have recently acquired 14 acres of land (at a price of $278M) near downtown San Francisco for groundbreaking of a brand new campus, as they are currently busting at the seams at their current Financial District address (spanning multiple high-rise buildings).
- New offerings such as Database.com (a Cloud-based database product) and Chatter.com (Facebook for businesses and business people) have been announced.
- Revenue continues to grow at 35% year, and recently beat analyst revenue estimates (November).
And on and on...
And since nearly 80% of all software purchases are still for on-premise software applications, there's a long way for Salesforce, and the Cloud, to go.
So anyone who suggests that Web-based applications, the Cloud, and SAAS applications are a short-term fad need only look to Salesforce.com for the evidence that suggests otherwise.