Teach Your "Old" App New Tricks

Whether you're an application developer, a product manager, or simply an application user, you've probably run into this - you need to access a new data source!

Take the case of an application like Adobe's ColdFusion. An application (or more specifically, a web application development platform) that has quite a loyal following. Some versions of ColdFusion includes JDBC drivers, but Adobe also makes it pretty easy for users to add in drivers of their own choosing.

Adobe's instructions for adding a 3rd-party JDBC driver to ColdFusion

That's great if you want to talk to other relational databases, but what if your new data source is a SaaS or cloud service? Perhaps Salesforce.com's CRM solution, or maybe your company uses Microsoft Dynamics?

Thankfully, you can readily enhance the "reach" of many existing enterprise applications by simply leveraging what these applications do well, which is support data access standards!

With Datadirect Cloud from Progress Software, an application that supports SQL standards like ODBC or JDBC can now access data residing in the cloud or in the leading SaaS systems! Without modifying the application!

Back to ColdFusion - how do you integrate your Salesforce CRM data into an Adobe ColdFusion app that you're building? Well, Datadirect Cloud has a JDBC driver that can be configured in the ColdFusion Administrator to point to your Salesforce login in the Datadirect Cloud service.

Choose the "other" option when adding your own JDBC driver

Add the appropriate data source details and login credentials

Once the driver is configured, it's easy to test the configuration information to ensure that all is configured properly. ColdFusion thinks it's just talking to a relational database - do you notice a trend here?!?!?!!

Click on "Verify All Connections".

With access defined in the ColdFusion Administrator, that data can now be incorporated into your ColdFusion application or solution using ColdFusion Builder.

Salesforce objects available as relational tables

The Salesforce SaaS data can be inspected, just like the data in the other relational data sources.

Inspecting Salesforce Data

The results, just as expected.

Salesforce Data

Of course, since Datadirect Cloud makes data sources appear as though they are relational systems, SQL can be used to query the data.

SQL against Salesforce

Other solutions built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform can be integrated into ColdFusion using Datadirect Cloud, too. Here's data in BMC's RemedyForce being accessed in the same manner.

SQL against BMC Remedyforce

Data in any and all of these sources are or will soon be able to be accessed through Datadirect Cloud using applications like Adobe ColdFusion.

The ever-growing list of sources reachable through Datadirect Cloud

If your application talks to databases, chances are it can talk to clouds, too!