Loading data into Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is best known for their customer relationship management suite, making it an increasingly common data source to work with. This type of data source utilizes a web API, that developers can interface with the data within the massive cloud service.

Sometimes, the data that is generated from within Salesforce.com is only part of the story around managing customer relationships, and greater benefit can be had by loading in data from other sources to aid in generating sales. This recipe will teach you how to set up and connect to a development Salesforce.com instance and load data into it.

Getting ready

Before we can cover how to interact with Salesforce.com, you will need to register for a developer environment that looks and feels like a full-blown production environment, albeit on a smaller scale. Navigate to http://www.developerforce.com/events/regular/registration.php and fill out the form to register. We will be using the already constructed applications...