Platform Interoperability: Force.com Talks To Google App Engine

In my opinion, the future of Cloud Computing will be a more federated ecosystem than few players holding a monopoly kind of dominance. In such a federated ecosystem, interoperability becomes very important. I have emphasized the importance of interoperability many times in this space. Unless we have Clouds talking to one another, we will end up with information silos much like the previous desktop era. Both the vendors and users are realizing the importance of this and we are seeing more and more players opening up their Clouds to talk to other vendors.

Yesterday, Salesforce.com announced a new version of Force.com for Google App Engine. This is a set of developer tools that helps developers build web apps on Google App Engine and then tap into the data on Salesforce.com. This opens up interesting possibilities for the developers and, especially, to the enterprises. With the release of Java support in Google App Engine, more and more enterprise applications are on the horizon. If these applications can use the data stored in the Salesforce.com Cloud, it will immensely benefit the enterprise customers.

Force.com for Google App Engine is a set of Python and Java libraries that can be installed on Google App Engine and, then, be used to make API calls to Force.com web services. It is possible to query and manipulate data residing on the Force.com platform from any application built on top of Google App Engine. Java libraries will allow developers to read and write to Force.com using an open source SOAP web services client. The Java toolkit is available here and the Python library here.

The marriage between Salesforce.com and Google, which started off with Google Maps for Salesforce CRM mashups and Google Adwords inside Salesforce, has gone a long way towards making both their platforms talk to each other closely. In fact, we also saw a marriage between Google App Engine and Zoho Creator last year (Disclaimer: Zoho is the sole sponsor of this blog but this post in my independent opinion). We are also seeing interoperability between various applications on the Cloud and, also, at the infrastructure level (though we have a long way to go before these measures mature). All these actions by Cloud vendors offers lots of promise and huge opportunities for the enterprise players to embrace the Clouds.