Rollbase now speaks Spanish, French, German, and SOAP

Rollbase Web Services: SOAP API

This weekend we released the initial version of the Rollbase SOAP API. Documentation is available here:
http://www.rollbase.com/webapi/wsdl/WebServicesAPI.pdf

WSDL available here:
http://www.rollbase.com/webapi/wsdl/rollbase.wsdl

This API consists of standard CRUD (create, read, update, delete) methods as well as search, binary file upload/download methods for  working with file fields, methods for working with relationships, and a method for retrieving a full XML representation of an Object definition and all of its components (the XML Schema Definition for the object definition document format can be found here: http://www.rollbase.com/webapi/wsdl/objectDescription.xsd).

We've had a lot of questions and interest around integrating with Rollbase in various ways and this is a first step toward enabling many types of integration scenarios using standards-based Web Services. A REST API is also currently under development (stay tuned).

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In addition to the SOAP API, we also rolled out the first iteration of our new multilingual capabilities this weekend. With this release we have completed the initial framework for multi-language support and to get things started we used an automatic translation tool to generate the French, German and Spanish resource files. This means the quality of these translations may be poor right now, and will be improved over time through our internal efforts as well as feedback from the user community. To enable this we are considering a way to provide wiki-style editing of each language resource. Meanwhile if you are interested in seeing a language other than English, Spanish, French or German, soon we will be making the full English resource file publicly available for you to use in creating a new translation.

To try out one of these languages now go to Setup > Personal Setup > My Settings, and change the "Language" picklist. As soon as you save your settings your entire Rollbase user interface will dynamically switch to the newly selected language.

Note: objects and their attributes, properties, fields, relationships, etc, which have been installed from the Application Directory (including the default Rollbase application) are not automatically translated for you when you switch to a different language. This is because all of the names and labels for these items are customizable for each customer and hence stored at the metadata level, not as static content in Rollbase resource files. However, multilingual capabilities are in fact available for metadata, customer-specific content such as object names, field labels, etc, and we are working on adding multilingual capabilities to the application serialization process thereby allowing published applications to install with support for more than one language (assuming the publisher provides all of the necessary translations).

Cloud Computing Platforms on the Rise

Phil Wainewright's recent Enterprise SaaS and the cloud post summarizes the choices ISVs have when building a SaaS application:

• A. Build the application on your own infrastructure, which you’ll have to assemble from scratch using open source and commodity components.
• B. Build it on a packaged platform from an established application infrastructure vendor such as Oracle, Microsoft, Progress Software, etc.
• C. Build it on a cloud computing platform and let the provider take care of the infrastructure for you.

If its not obvious from our demo and previous posts, Rollbase is all about option C. When we launch our public beta in the coming weeks our unique approach to this will become clearer. Wainewright goes on to discuss option C in the context of Salesforce.com's new Developer-as-a-Service offering:

“Force.com is one of a rapidly expanding number of cloud computing platform choices available to ISVs today. Just to mention a few that spring to mind, they range from basic infrastructure hosting propositions such as Amazon’s EC2, Joyent and OpSource; through generic application development platforms such as Bungee Labs, Iceberg and Coghead; to platforms that serve specific application categories such as NetSuite SuiteBuilder and social network platform Ning.”

You can count Rollbase among the generic application development platforms, but there are significant differentiators to many of those mentioned here. One being the ability to go beyond back-end business apps like CRM, HRIS, etc, to external facing applications that integrate with those apps on the back-end and customer's websites or intranets on the front-end. More on this when we launch. We have some new published applications we're preparing for our beta launch that should get the gears turning on what is possible with Rollbase.

When I saw that Marc Andreessen was getting on stage with Marc Benioff I assumed we'd be hearing about a streamlined way to integrate Ning-based social networking apps with Salesforce and Force.com-based apps. It looks like nothing of the sort was mentioned. Rather, Andreeson was there to talk about the rise of Internet platform companies in general:

“There will be a whole wave of new Internet platform companies... The good news it there is a common definition of ‘platform’–you, the end user, can program it... In the past, for the last 40 or 50 years, you run [software] on single computer that you mostly have to buy, own, and manage. This shift to an Internet-based, hosted or cloud or whatever you want to call it, running on the Internet, is a very big deal. It opens up all kinds of possibilities. There will be literally thousands of new companies and we are just starting to see the cascading of that. We have seen a wave of Web services APIs and a second wave of plug-in APIs, like Facebook apps, and now the third wave like salesforce, Ning, Amazon’s S3 and a growing number of startups where code is uploaded to run in cloud... One of the reasons you’re going to see so many of these things is these concepts are applicable to so many different domains.”

(quotes from Dan Farber & Larry Dignan)

“The big deal is that Internet, cloud platforms make it far easier to create and deploy applications. Even at the heart of Silicon Valley with world’s most sophisticated technical people, startups are building their companies and products virtually. The cloud has arrived, and ironically it is creating more sunlight than shade. The big profits will come later...”

Marc [Andreessen], we couldn't agree more, puns aside (its actually pretty cloudy here in the Bay Area these days).

Back to the DaaS announcement, one of the key items mentioned was the new Force.com metadata API which:

“...takes customizations that would previously have been done in Salesforce.com’s business user-friendly point-and-click configuration interface and abstracts them into editable lines of XML code.”

This shouldn't surprise anyone who gets the meta thing. With Rollbase all applications are defined at the metadata level through the Rollbase UI using point & click, drag & drop tools within the browser. What users don't see happening behind the scenes is that when an application is published, it and all of its components (pages, views, charts, reports, workflow, events, mappings, etc) along with all of its component configurations and even images and document templates are serialized into XML which can be easily exposed to developers if the need arises. In this way every Rollbase application is represented as a single XML document which the Rollbase runtime engine can instantiate as necessary (more on instantiation in a future post; for any parsing gurus out there you should know that this XML is only parsed when an application is installed into a user's account, this does not actually happen at runtime for obvious performance reasons).

Overall its a pretty good time to be working on a new cloud computing platform. Stay tuned for information about our public beta launch, and thanks for reading.