How to integrate salesforce with external applications?

 Integration in Salesforce refers to the process of connecting and sharing data between Salesforce and other external systems, applications, or services. It enables Salesforce to seamlessly communicate with other platforms, allowing businesses to streamline their operations, enhance customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions.

Before diving into integration, make sure you have a good understanding of how Salesforce works, its key components like objects, fields, and how data is structured.Make sure to familiarize yourself with integration concepts like APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), REST, SOAP, and different integration patterns.

Salesforce Integration Options:

Salesforce provides multiple integration options. Some of the common ones include are below:

REST and SOAP APIs: Salesforce supports both REST API and SOAP API for integrating with external systems and applications.

Rest API are best for web or mobile applications due to its simplicity and ease of use. It supports both XML and JSON format. REST uses standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc., to interact with resources.

SOAP support XML only for request and response and hence sometime it is very complex to deal with as compared to JSON in Rest. It is not commonly used now a days.

Bulk API: Bulk API's are based on REST principles and are optimized for working with large sets of data asynchronously. There are two versions of this API – Bulk API and Bulk API 2.0. Bulk API 2.0 is a new and improved version of Bulk API. Bulk API 2.0 provides a simple interface to load large amounts of data into your Salesforce org and to perform bulk queries on your org data. Its design is more consistent and better integrated with other Salesforce APIs. Bulk API 2.0 also has the advantage of future innovation. As per the Salesforce any data operation that includes more than 2,000 records is a good candidate for Bulk API.

Salesforce Connect: Use this to access and display external data in Salesforce without physically storing it in Salesforce databases. It makes use of external objects. Salesforce Connect maps Salesforce external objects to data tables in external systems. Instead of copying the data into your org, Salesforce Connect accesses the data on demand and in real time. The data is never stale, and we access only what you need.

We can use Salesforce connect in below scenarios:

You have a large amount of data that you don’t want to copy into your Salesforce org.

You need small amounts of data at any one time.

You want real-time access to the latest data.

Outbound Messaging: Automate the sending of data to external systems using SOAP-based messages. You can see the option to send the outbound message under work flow rule.

Apex Integration Services: Use Apex programming to build custom integrations.

Streaming API : Streaming API enables streaming of events using push technology and provides a subscription mechanism for receiving events in near real time. The Streaming API subscription mechanism supports multiple types of events, including PushTopic events, generic events, platform events, and Change Data Capture events.