Apex classes and methods can be exposed to external applications as REST based endpoints. This means that there's a very easy way to have an external application make a direct call into Salesforce to do a specific action.
In this blog article, we'll be focused in on the Analytics API because it's primarily used for reporting and dashboards.
Salesforce has really transformed a lot of companies I've been involved with because it's made the sales team way more effective and allowed all people that need access to know what's going on. Integrating Salesforce with other apps has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and productivity in businesses.
SOAP is basically an XML based API that existed before the REST API existed. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol - it's a mostly legacy protocol that was designed for doing remote api requests in a language independent way. From time to time unfortunately, we'll need to call a SOAP API.
Reasons to Integrate Salesforce is part of the blog post series: Integrating Salesforce With Other Apps – A Series! Salesforce has a few…