In a new post to his blog Court Ewing takes a look at integrating your PHP application with one of the most popular and powerful CRM solutions out there, Salesforce.

If your primary clientele is small to medium business owners, as I imagine is the case for most professional developers these days, chances are you have developed custom applications that interact with Salesforce CRM. For those of you that have not had the delight of integrating with Salesforce, let's walk through the most common integration techniques.

He starts with the Force.com web services and shows how to generate your WSDL, get your security token for requests and gives some example code that uses both to test the login. He follows this with examples of the five methods that are a "must know" for anyone using the API - upsert, retrieve, getUpdated, delete, getDeleted. He throws in a few "gotchas" at the end - one dealing with retrieve calls and their results and the other relates to how the PHP toolkit handles errors.