Introducing Glide: GraphQL for Salesforce

One of Postlight’s specialties is integrating platform functionality into products using APIs, and Salesforce is the biggest CRM platform out there. Recently on a client project, we used Salesforce to power the product we built with a React-based web frontend. But it wasn’t a great developer experience. We were constantly breaking the app with simple typos since the queries were “stringly-typed.” Having the ability to use GraphQL instead of Salesforce Object Query Language would have been a dream come true. That’s why we built Glide.

Glide is a free toolkit for engineers who are building Salesforce integrations into their apps. Glide allows you to seamlessly execute GraphQL requests against any Salesforce instance with minimal setup. The code is free and open source. Get Glide on GitHub.

Why GraphQL?

Developers love working with GraphQL, because it brings a strongly-typed schema to your application’s data, and gives clients control over requesting exactly what they need, no more and no less. This reduces network traffic (and latency) compared to REST, where your app has to make multiple calls to various endpoints to retrieve the data it needs (plus some it doesn’t). When GraphQL is paired with React, it’s an incredible development toolchain.

Glide is the quickest way to prototype and build GraphQL applications backed by Salesforce data. Glide automatically introspects your Salesforce data models, and creates an intuitive and idiomatic GraphQL schema out of the box. Glide also handles Salesforce authentication for you, so you can hit the ground running and start prototyping right away.

Glide can spin up a GraphQL server pointing at your Salesforce instance, or you can import Glide into your existing server code and deploy it. With Glide, you can start making GraphQL queries and mutations on your Salesforce data in two commands. Step-by-step instructions to get started are available in the docs.

Give Glide a try on your next Salesforce project, contribute to Glide on GitHub, and be sure to let us know what you build with it!

Zak Golba (@zacharygolba) is a Senior Engineer at Postlight. Wanna talk Salesforce integrations? Drop us a note: hello@postlight.com.