Synchronizing SalesForce and Ruby on Rails
Posted in Salesforce, HowTo, Ruby on Rails 
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Salesforce, the large Customer Relationship Management tool, and Ruby on Rails, the elegant web development framework, seem like an awkward pair. About as awkward as dipping a Wendy’s french fry in a frosty.
Salesforce is large, often times confusing, and is a tool built for handling lots of different jobs. Rails is lean, elegant, and designed specifically for making web development easier. While Salesforce and Rails are dramatically different, they actually work very well together (much like a Wendy’s french fry dipped in a frosty – trust me).
This unlikely pairing is sparked by ActiveSalesforce, a Ruby on Rails connection adapter to Salesforce-managed data. This Ruby Gem makes working with Salesforce data about as easy as the Rails-MySQL combination.
Highgroove Studios is working on a Salesforce-Rails application, and one of the things we have to do is synchronize a local MySQL database with Salesforce. This is needed because the connection to Salesforce is slower than when working with a local database, and several parts of the application are time-sensitive.
Here’s a look at how we designed the application to synchronize data between the local database and Salesforce.
