One approach to reducing the amount of data in Salesforce is to maintain large data sets in a different application, and then make that application available to Salesforce as needed. Salesforce refers to such an arrangement as a mashup because it provides a quick, loosely coupled integration of the two applications. Mashups use Salesforce presentation to display Salesforce-hosted data and externally hosted data.
Salesforce supports the following mashup designs.
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External Website
- : The Salesforce UI displays an external website, and passes information and requests to it. With this design, you can make the website look like part of the Salesforce UI.
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Callouts
- : Apex code allows Salesforce to use Web services to exchange information with external systems in real time.
Because of their real-time restrictions, mashups are limited to short interactions and small amounts of data.
See Apex Developer Guide.
Advantages of Using Mashups
- Data is never stale.
- No proprietary method needs to be developed to integrate the two systems.
Disadvantages of Using Mashups
- Accessing data takes more time.
- Functionality is reduced. For example, reporting and workflow do not work on the external data.