In this chapter, we have reviewed enterprise application integration and extensibility requirements through the eyes of a persona known as Developer X. By using this persona, much like your UI designs, you can ensure that your API tracks real use cases and requirements from the representative and ideally actual users of it.

When defining your API strategy, keep in mind the benefits of the standard Salesforce APIs and how to evangelize those and the significant investment Salesforce puts into them in order to provide access to the information stored in your Custom Objects. When needed, leverage your Service layer to create application APIs either on-and/or off-platform using Apex and REST as delivery mechanisms. Keep in mind that REST requires additional design considerations to ensure that your REST API can be considered properly RESTful and thus familiar to Developer X who has been using other REST APIs.

Don't forget that while technologies such as Visualforce and Apex provide you...