Salesforce released its 38^th upgrade last week, dubbed ‘Summer 12’. The upgrade brings to the platform geo-location data, a drag-n-drop schema builder, and streaming data for real-time apps. REST-based APIs that have been introduced also offer enhancement to collaboration and other data services.

As mobile apps continue to gain popularity, Salesforce has put increased emphasis on Force.com PaaS capabilities by offering locations of customers, mobile employees and goods at various distribution points. This upgrade is part of the annual three major updates that Salesforce releases.

According to the Director of Tech Platform Marketing at Salesforce, Quinton Wall, the shift to a mobile-first world where everything is location aware has made it necessary to make “latitude and longitude natively available.” Wall added that this location data is implemented using a mobile software development kit.

REST-based APIs (Representational State Transfer) are increasingly being favored in the Web and mobile development communities and are displacing SOAP and WSDL Web service-call methods due to their ease of use. With REST APIs, for example, queries can be done quickly and easily without the need to deploy a WSDL file or push a database schema update. The Schema (News - Alert) Builder, location feed, and Salesforce Chatter collaboration feed use REST APIs.

The Summer ’12 upgrade supports real-time apps, minus the hassle of requiring users to install and run middleware. Developers simply specify the ‘push topic’ information. For example, this allows manufacturers to notify distributors when products are ready for shipment. The push option also allows the over 500,000 developers who have developed over 300,000 applications for the Salesforce platform to update app functionality automatically, rather than having customers pull in the upgrades themselves. This cloud computing model ultimately makes it possible for applications to be updated in real time without the user having to know about it.

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