Ruby, XMPP, and Soap Web Services

I've spent a lot of time away from the office lately and haven't had much of a chance to post. Here's a quick update on what I've been thinking about.

First off, the Ruby XMPP-bot I had started is complete. This was insanely easy to implement in Ruby. The only snag I ran into was in creating a new chat room with the bot. The 0.3.1 release of XMPP4R seems to hang when creating a new room. After some research, it was apparent that others experienced this problem and had already submitted a patch. Cool.

My next job is to connect the bot to an application my company developed. Communication to this module has been done previously using CORBA. Unfortunately (or not), I have not been able to find an acceptable Ruby CORBA module (Rinn looks like it's dead and R2CORBA does not appear mature enough). Recently many of our legacy CORBA API's have been replaced with Web Service API's and I'm going to take this approach with this module.

While researching for a Ruby SOAP library, I came across this post describing an integration with SalesForce.com.

I've heard a lot about SalesForce.com and knew it was a CRM solution, but never took an in depth look at all it offered. In addition to all the customer, sales, and marketing tools, SalesForce.com includes integration with many popular third party applications (like Outlook), single sign-on capability for corporate users, and a variety of other utilities. This allows users to seamlessly interact with the SalesForce suite, using their existing work flow rather than being forced to adopt the "SalesForce Way".

What I was most impressed with however, was SalesForce's developer tools (web service API) and it's AppExchange. AppExchange allows third-parties to extend SalesForce functionality though custom application plugins. The developer API allows businesses to roll their own solutions when needed. By acknowledging that they'd never be able fill every business need, and accepting help from it's community to do so, SalesForce has rapidly become the hottest business application around.

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