- it's free!
I've just spent the day at Tour de Force here in Dublin, where I had a spectacular time meeting prospective developers, ISVs, clients, partners, system admins and folk such as CODA and Fairsail.
The web team here in EMEA created a few videos highlighting some of the activities of the day. So thanks to Mark Stanley, Kieran Guckian, Fintan Lillis, Aonghus Flynn and Stephanie Robotham for these vids!
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken());
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries)
titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events.
Creating an event is similarly straightforward:
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken());
GoogleData.Calendar cal =
service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
Event ee = new Event(
subject = 'Cool new Event',
description = 'Clouds in the sky',
ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
DurationInMinutes = 120
);
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above).
There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits:
- Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs - The Home Page
- Google Data APIs
- Google Data APIs Toolkit Setup
- Google Documents API
- Google Calendar API
- Google Spreadsheets API
- Blogger API
- Contacts API
- Google Data Authentication
- Browse the Toolkit code here
Technorati Tags: google data, force.com, google
Today at the Santa Clara Tour de Force we are releasing the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs - a set of Apex libraries that makes connecting Google's Docs, Sheets, Calendar and other tools with your Force.com apps simple and straightforward. Now the capabilities and power of Google Apps are not only available and integrated for salesforce.com users, but also developers - letting them easily create new apps that combine the two systems.
Perhaps the most significant (and technically interesting!) aspect of the toolkit is that unlike the early Web 2.0 mashups that worked primarily by combining services within the browser via JavaScript, this toolkit works by literally connecting the clouds - all of the integration and interaction happens 'in the cloud' rather than on the client. This is possible because of the increasingly rich capabilities of the Apex runtime within Force.com - and significant because these server side interactions can be much richer and robust than anything possible on the client. Best of all, its remarkably easy to use - just a few lines of code will have your Force.com apps exchanging data with Google Apps in real time. This is a new model for mashups, and one we think will become increasingly common.
You can learn more about the toolkit on our website, and in person at one of our upcoming Tour de Force events. And as always we look forward to getting your feedback, and learning about what you have built.
Well my first month or two here at developer.force.com has been absolutely hectic. There are a lot of people to meet, there's a lot of technology to learn, newsgroups to read, wikis to garden and so on, and I feel that I'm just at the tip of the iceberg. There is so much to do.
I've started to blog about some of the technology I'm learning here (see Emailing Visualforce Pages Rendered as PDFs that generated some great private tweet traffic!), and I've just been exposed to the release of Summer '08, and seen first hand how all of our customers were upgraded to a new platform. SaaS in action. The upgrade was almost too discreet. All of a sudden all the force.com developers have a boatload of new functionality (see the release notes on the documentation page), and it just happened.
For the next two weeks I'm off to San Francisco/Santa Clara to attend, among other things, the Tour de Force event there. After that, I'm flying back to Edinburgh for a week, and then I'm off to Dublin in Ireland, for the following Tour de Force event. If you're going to be at any of these events, please connect with me. I'll most likely be in the Dev Zone!
I'll leave you with this Tour de Force advert I came across on YouTube. You know, I still don't have one of those "no software" badges...
Mark your calendar! We are pleased to announce the next three cities for Tour de Force: Santa Clara, CA on June 23, Dublin, Ireland on June 30, and Tokyo, Japan on July 3. Registration is officially open for Santa Clara, and we?ll open registration for Dublin and Tokyo after we nail down a few final details in the next few days.
This also marks the launch of the official Tour de Force microsite, which -? in addition to all the registration information and venue, speaker, and agenda details -- includes the Tour blog, community Flickr feed, and a few of the hands-on tutorials that are at the heart of the Immersion Lab experience. Bookmark the site so you can stay up-to-date on the latest Tour de Force news and announcements, and watch as we grow the site with more content and features.
We have always been big fans of eBay, and especially the work they have been doing with their platform - so we were delighted to be invited to keynote and present at the eBay Developers Conference June 16-18th in Chicago. There has been a lot of great work between our communities already, including Infopia's e-commerce app and the Skype mashup - but when you add in the new integration features of Apex and Visualforce, along with a host of APIs from Skype, Paypal and other eBay services you can quickly imagine some pretty interesting new apps. Join us there to learn the technical details of how to bring Force.com and eBay together (and show us what you've built since our Chicago Tour de Force last month!)
After crossing the pond this past weekend, most of the Force.com team is now in London this week for the Dreamforce Europe 2008 conference. So apparently chicken tikka masala is the UK's most popular restaurant dish as opposed to my personal British pub favorite, fish and chips - as a result, our first meal in town was at Masala Zone in Covent Garden where many of us met the newest member of our team, Jon Mountjoy, former editor-in-chief of BEA's Dev2Dev online community. Unlike the rest of us Yanks, Jon lives in Edinburgh and will be able to provide better coverage for our EMEA community.
The Force.com evangelism team will be meeting with many developers at the Dreamforce event and also doing one-on-one meetings throughout the week with customers and partners in London. Drop us a line and let us know if you're in town for Dreamforce and we'd be happy to make time this week to help you build your next great app! If not, stay tuned for the latest technical announcements coming out of Dreamforce - we're excited by all the platform features that Force.com developers will soon be able to get their hands in the Spring '08 production release and upcoming Summer '08 feature preview!
With all the excitement around Tour de Force, and the upcoming trip to London for Dreamforce Europe, I wanted make sure you didn't miss a cool update to a classic AppExchange app called PrintAnything. A while back I wrote a blog post that covered how to integrate PrintAnything with Google Docs to generate PDF output. Now, with the updated version of PrintAnything called Astitch Document Generator, you can perform this directly using the service provided by Astitch.net.
There are two things I like about this app, first off it's free and secondly it's a technically deep product, lots of customizations are possible once you learn how to utilize XSLT templates and construct the required SOQL queries. Not a task for everyone, but if XSLT is exciting or even something you would like to learn, check out this app!
We landed in Boston along with thousands of people from all around the world who had come to run the Boston Marathon. But the more than 500 Force.com customers, partners and developers who joined us at the Tour de Force event had a different goal in mind: to learn how to build apps on the Force.com platform.
Salesforce administrators and developers got really excited, not only because they were able to attend Tour de Force for free and attend sessions tailored for them, but they were able to go to the DevZone Immersion Lab, pick up the Force.com Workbook, sit at one of the Apple Macs, log into their own ?free Developer Edition account? and learn about Force.com Builder, Force.com IDE, Apex Code, Visualforce and Force.com Code Share while building a simple mileage tracker app in a short time between sessions.
As I was talking to folks at the early evening reception in the DevZone, many of them were telling me they had realized the power of the Force.com platform and ideas were sparking in their minds, from building new business solutions for their company to building their own software-as-a-service businesses by developing Force.com apps to sell.
If you were not able to take advantage of the educational experience as part of the 1st leg of the Tour de Force, watch for the next set of Tour de Force events coming to a city near you.
Meanwhile, you can go to "Getting Started" on the Force.com Developer Community site.
