First release of DataBasin

I'm pleased to announce the first release of DataBasin, a tool which allows to access Data on SalesForce.com using its WebService APIs. Core part of the tool is the API implementation in Objective-C, which uses the GNUstep WebServices for the low-level interaction.

The API implementation is designed to be reusable in other application and is LGPL'd.

Basic functionalities like Query, Insert and Delete are implemented (and of course log-in!) but the tool contains many rough parts, like the CVS importer/exporter so production use is not yet recommended.

As far as I know this is the only open source library for Salesforce.com, at least in Objective-C.

In the screenshot DataBasin running on Debian GNU/Linux.

A big thanks to many friends who helped me implementing the API and debugging the SOAP Calls. First of all Richard Frith-MacDonald who extended the GSWS to support SOAP in the first place. Then two colleagues, Andrea Rosa and Enrico Murru who helped track down many bugs.

DataBasin, or how to access salesforce.com from Objective-C

After several weeks of work, I can announce my first concrete success: the download of the contact list from the CRM to a CSV file.

On supported platforms, like Java or C#, salesforce.com offers libraries for a convenient access to their APIs (webservice interfaces). For Objective-C and GNUstep of course there is nothing of the kind. Thus I started writing a layer to access the webservices directly using SOAP calls. To be able to write those, I use GNUstep's WebServices framework, which I discovered was still quite rough and incomplete. Richard Frith-MacDonald though promptly debugged it and extended it. Until the first login was possible, a lot of debugging and investigation on the calls was necessary, I was patiently supported by my colleague Andrea Rosa.

Currently the donload means that the Login method completes correctly and returns a valid session, which is then reused to perform the query request and interpret its response. It is a demonstration that the whole concept can work

My intention is to develop DataBasin to be a free Open Source alternative to the DataLoader tool supplied by salesforce.com. Once I reach that goal, I alreayd have further ideas on how to extend it.

DataBasin is part of the GNUstep Application Project and will be released there once ready for prime time.