What’s Possible with Heroku AppLink

Narrator
Hello and welcome to Code[ish], an exploration of the lives of modern developers. Join us as we dive into topics like languages and frameworks, data and event-driven architectures, artificial intelligence, and individual and team productivity. Tailored to developers and engineering leaders, this episode is part of our deeply technical series.

Jon
Hello everyone! My name is Jon Dodson and I’m an engineer working for Heroku. I’m a big Heroku super fan and excited to talk to you about what awesome stuff is happening at Heroku. And today friends, today is a fun day because we’re here to celebrate one of our newest releases, Heroku AppLink. And to talk about Heroku AppLink, I’m joined by the creator of AppLink itself, Chris Wall. Hello, Chris.

Chris
Hey Jon, thanks for having me on.

Jon
Yeah, thank you. So all right, Chris, we’re just going to jump straight into it. So, if you could tell everyone a bit about yourself and what you do for Heroku.

Chris
Yeah. So I’m an architect at Salesforce focused on bringing Heroku closer to Salesforce. About me, I was born in LA and raised outside D.C.. Got married in San Francisco. I raised kids in Austin, Texas, and I’m currently living in Denver, Colorado. So, one could say I’ve been around.

Jon
Yeah, you’re all over the place. That’s awesome. So, one of the things you’ve accomplished in your career is you’ve worked for Salesforce for 18 years, which is a really impressive accomplishment. Congratulations on that. That’s a lot of time. And I’m sure you have an opinion on the last 20 years of tech and sort of how that impacts a large company like Salesforce. So, any lessons that you learned with that that you want to share with everyone?

Chris
Well, first, it certainly doesn’t seem like 18 years.

Jon
Right.

Chris
I think it’s partly because Salesforce has always been on the forefront of change. It’s certainly a big company, but Salesforce prides itself in a startup culture to a large extent. During my time at Salesforce, I’ve probably heard “This product or this pivot is revolutionary” probably every other year. And honestly, Salesforce has been generally right about those changes. So I remember Chatter, Web 2.0, and mobile, and most recently data and data cloud, and of course Agentforce and agents. It’s been really exciting, it’s a never boring journey here at Salesforce. You know, I’m really fortunate to be part of it. The one thing that has kept Salesforce going that I’ve adopted is to embrace change. Make change, be part of the change, actually. The same is true in the world we live in today. Change is constant and seems even more so these days.

Jon
Yeah, I totally agree. Especially with AI, there’s a lot of changes happening. So, some folks in tech feel that technology and software is limitless insomuch as what we can dream, we can create. And I sort of really enjoy the creative aspects of my job in programming, and really, like, seeing a feature being built from nothing. For you, was there any a time in your career where you worked on something new, where it was exciting to see that creativity come together?

Chris
Yeah. First of all, that was well said. I really like how you frame that. And for me, there’s been many things along the way, both grand and small. And a small but super mind blowing thing, at least at the time, was when I was the Visualforce team lead years ago.

Jon
Oh, cool.

Chris
Web pages were mostly static at the time, or at least the content was. Then we introduced Ajax. Remember Ajax, or what we called remoting to Visualforce and just saw pages come alive. I mean, that was super exciting. Seems somewhat silly now.

Jon
Yeah.

Chris
But it was a game changer at the time. And of course, now I feel like I’m dating myself.

Jon
Yeah. No, I remember that. It was exciting. I didn’t quite understand Ajax at first. I’m like, no, no one cares. And then I saw how amazing it was. And when I got access to Gmail, I think that was the first app that I saw. And I was so excited when I got on the beta, I was like, yes!

Chris
Yeah, totally. But it was really just a simple technology. It was just the next evolution of the web.

Jon
Yeah.

Chris
Things are crazier now. I remember opening up Firebug back in the day.

Jon
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Chris
And doing some fun things, and of course, being a Google developer. And then I’ve most recently opened it up to check it out. And oh my gosh, what you can do in one of those tools is just amazing.

Jon
Yeah, they’ve evolved pretty far. That’s really funny that you mentioned Firebug. I haven’t thought about that forever. I love Firebug. I was probably a Firebug hold out way longer than I should have been, right? Because Firebug initially, if memory serves, it was a browser extension.

Chris
Yeah.

Jon
And then all of the browsers got basically their own Firebug. And so it took me a while before I used the native what was in all the browsers or whatever. But I’ve loved Firebug for so long. It’s like, for me, I like building kind of a relationship with tools, so sometimes it’s a little hard for me to let go.

Chris
Oh, totally, totally agree with that.

Jon
Yeah. So I’m curious for you, like what’s some piece of advice you’d give to aspiring developers who are just starting their journey in development?

Chris
That’s a good one. Well, this might be obvious, but learn AI and embrace AI.

Jon
Yeah, it’s a good one.

Chris
There’s definitely a lot of developer anxiety around AI.

Jon
Yes.

Chris
I could see how AI parallels the internet age, the late 90s, early 2000s. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity with AI. It’ll touch, what, nearly every aspect of our lives. And developers are the ones who will deliver that AI change. So it’s not just learn and embrace AI. Let’s figure out how you as a developer can help shape the future with AI. I mean, I really believe that developers are without a doubt essential to the AI revolution.

Jon
Yeah, absolutely I agree. So what’s one thing about working for Heroku and Salesforce that you think would be interesting for people to know, they might not know?

Chris
Culture. Very strong culture. Heroku is rapidly advancing next-generation runtime, uplifting data stores, integrating with Salesforce. But there’s a tight community within Heroku while also being super laser-focused on quality, user experience, and customer success. But I think what bonds us all is the Heroku culture.

Jon
I completely agree. For me, it’s the strongest I’ve felt for a company that I’ve worked for, and I really appreciate it a lot. I’ve worked on like, three teams this year and they’re all great. I mean, everyone is fantastic. It’s really inspiring for me to work with people that are so good at what they do, and they’re really good people too.

Chris
Yeah, they are.

Jon
I don’t know. I mean, we all got to work. We all got to deal with the job thing, and it’s nice to do it with people that are great. So I agree with you on that.

Chris
Yeah. Early in my career, a coworker of mine asked me, why are we putting in these 80 hour weeks? Why are we doing this? And his response to his own question was, it’s the people. I really enjoy working with the people. And I think that’s true at Heroku.

Jon
So let’s focus a bit on AppLink, because it’s the really cool release right now and you’ve worked a lot on that. So AppLink is a totally new product at Heroku we just launched. So I’m wondering if you can tell us what is AppLink and why does it exist?

Chris
Yeah, we’re super excited about AppLink. I mean, simply it brings Heroku closer to Salesforce. It empowers Salesforce customers with Heroku’s capabilities. I mean, it’s long overdue that Heroku is put in the hands of Salesforce customers. And then Heroku is an incredibly powerful, robust platform that today, Salesforce customers, for the most part, have not taken advantage. We want Heroku to be a natural, obvious, and unified extension to the Salesforce platform. And it’s not just AppLink, what we’re working on. Heroku is now an agentic platform. Heroku Eventing is our event-based platform, and all of which are tightly integrated with Salesforce. The way I like to think about it is that AppLink is the porcelain atop the plumbing.

Jon
Yeah.

Chris
It handles the security wiring of apps into orgs, and it enables customers, AppLink customers, to focus on their business use cases. Don’t worry about all this other stuff that effectively gets in the way of you developing solutions for your customers.

Jon
Yeah, I agree, and one of the things that I think is really exciting about AppLink is now you can say stuff like Python is a language you could use in Salesforce, which I think is great.

Jon
Yeah.

Jon
Which is not a thing we could do before and now you totally can, or, not even just Python but just anything on Heroku.

Chris
Anything on Heroku.

Jon
Yeah, which is awesome. I think that’s cool. So let’s go back to the beginning of AppLink, maybe even before it was an idea in your head, and it probably started off with some things you saw customers having problems with, or maybe problems that you saw. So when did you have that ah-ha moment for the creation of AppLink and you knew that this had to be a thing?

Chris
Yeah, really good question. AppLink was born from Salesforce Functions. Salesforce Functions is a product that we end-of-lifed this year, but not because it was a failure. Quite the opposite really. Customers loved it. It solved challenging use cases. But our challenge was that Heroku just simply couldn’t support it. But we knew we had something with Salesforce Functions. So AppLink is a re-imagination of Salesforce Functions, giving Heroku customers the power of Heroku… Salesforce customers the power of Heroku, excuse me. Instead of building a whole new experience like we did with Salesforce Functions, which was at times somewhat cumbersome, we, with AppLink, took the best of Heroku, the best of Salesforce. So we’re meeting personas where they are. So the Salesforce Admin manages AppLink with known Salesforce constructs, permission sets, connected apps, etc., and developers build atop Heroku with its renowned developer experience choosing platform capabilities that meet their apps needs. So it really is extending the Salesforce platform. It also brings Salesforce to Heroku customers, which we’re also excited about.

Jon
Yeah, totally. That is exciting. So what kind of Heroku apps do you envision benefiting most from AppLink? Are there any specific languages or frameworks that feel particularly at home with it?

Chris
Well, with AppLink subtle business cases are unbound. Of course, I’m going to say that. We have a prominent customer that is solving 6 to 7 challenges with AppLink and Eventing, which is super cool.

Jon
Okay.

Chris
They’re offloading high intensive compute to Heroku app. They’re migrating to an event-based architecture to act on high volume platform events and change app data capture events, all wired up and secure with AppLink and Eventing. And of course, AppLink and Eventing open up, as you said, Heroku’s Polyglot Platform to Salesforce customers. They could choose a language that suits their team’s skill sets and their business needs, they can use open source libraries, etc. So it really is, as you said, opening up the Salesforce platform to whole new capabilities.

Jon
Yeah, it seems like it. So one thing… I just kind of was thinking about it as you were talking right now, is one of the things that I sort of dealt with when I was doing Salesforce development. I may do a bit, but at Heroku, but mostly on our platform. And one of the things that I saw when I was doing Salesforce development, is running into like, you’d write a function, you’d write a method or some Apex code. Maybe my first pass wasn’t always perfect or whatever, and then I would go through and I’d hit some governor limits. I think one of the things about AppLink too is that you can sort of get around that by writing code that, you know, just to make sure everything’s scaled up in Heroku properly. But is that one of the use cases you were thinking about for AppLink as well too, which is like offloading that too?

Chris
Yeah, for sure. There’s limits on every platform. I mean, Salesforce is a multi-tenant architecture. Yeah, and sometimes customers, large customers, have really intense compute needs. And Heroku and Heroku AppLink compliments Apex and all the things that Salesforce platform offers. So the two of them together is a real great combo.

Jon
Yeah, totally. So one of the stories about AppLink is Eventing. And how does Heroku Eventing work with AppLink and what does it open up for real time applications? This is something I was reading through our documents and didn’t quite understand this one.

Chris
Yeah, Eventing is in pilot now. I encourage everyone to go check it out. It solves some real time use cases, but its main focus is event-based, where Heroku apps act on events as they’re consumed or events can be stored in one of Heroku managed data stores for eventual processing. Just like AppLink, the real neat thing about Eventing is that it handles the complexities of wiring up these event-based architectures, which can be very complicated. Eventing ensures a reliability across an array of event types, including platform events and changed data capture and agent events and whatever comes next. So with AppLink being the point to point integration tool or feature product, and Eventing being the indirect sort of integration to events product, Heroku and Salesforce have a real one two punch that solves a wide variety of integration use cases.

Jon
Cool. So I just want to warn everyone that this question contains light, and I mean very light spoilers for Superman… the 2025 Superman film. So if you don’t want to be spoiled, just skip ahead a few minutes. And when I mean light, I mean just the most light, there’s nothing plot related in here. Okay, this is really important everyone. So pay attention please. I recently watched the new 2025 Superman movie directed by James Gunn. In Superman 2025, we see the Superman robots get destroyed when the Fortress of Solitude is invaded. Spoiler. You were warned. So earlier in the film, Superman robots claim they have no consciousness, however, after they’re destroyed, they rebuild themselves for reasons which I don’t quite get as they clearly were all destroyed earlier, and why would they want to live if they weren’t conscious? But fine. Okay. That’s fine. That’s not a plot hole. I just didn’t quite understand it. But as you’ve noticed, this isn’t really a question, I’m just a nerd, and I have questions about this kind of nerdery and movies sometimes. But I guess if this was a question, like, I guess it would be if we look at AI of robots and stuff, like, I’ve got this robot at my house that vacuums my floor, I think it’s incredible, I love it, I have to do so much less vacuuming. So Chris as you’re like looking at robots and all the things that they can do in AI and the future, what aspect of all this do you want in your life right now? Any super cool AI robot tech that you’re excited for?

Chris
Yeah, I mean, first, that’s an interesting plotline. We recently watched The Terminator, and I find it incredible that how AI and robots… it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy to be part of our world, and it’s both exciting and kind of nervous, right?

Jon
Yeah.

Chris
Yeah. What I’m really excited for is any AI capability that enables self resolving.

Jon
Okay.

Chris
So AI determines that there’s a bug in the system and it just goes and fixes it, right? So like those sort of Heroku apps or Salesforce apps. But also my car. My irrigation system.

Jon
Yes.

Chris
My Wi-Fi, my TV, all the things that break and my family turns to me with their eyes and says, go fix it.

Jon
Yeah.

Chris
And so I just want some AI capability embedded in all these systems that just determines if there’s an issue and is no longer an issue because they fix it. I think that’s possible, right?

Jon
I think so, I mean, it would require the AI bots to have some problem solving skills and understand the underlying technology and stuff. But yeah, I think so. I’m not building it, so it seems possible to me.

Chris
Oh, one day we might, man.

Jon
Yeah, totally. One of the things that I was really thinking about that I really hope we have, and it doesn’t even have to be right now, it can definitely be in the future. I’m moving through age and I’m thinking about end of life, and I’ve got parents that are older and stuff like that and there’s two things well, moving there, I’m like halfway to the end, you know? So I’m thinking about two things. One of them is, which I think that we’re not too far away is like self-driving cars.

Chris
Yeah.

Jon
Someday I’m going to be so old that it’ll probably be dangerous for me to drive a car. Sorry, kids. That happens. You know, you get old, you really shouldn’t be driving. Some of us. So I’m really excited about that just so you can keep going to the store and stuff like that. The other thing I’m thinking of is like, how do you stay in your house when you’re older? You know what I mean? So hopefully we can get AI robots that can help with that. So I kind of think about, and I like that too, because if you had an AI bot in your house that could help fix stuff, but I’m just thinking about what if I’m too old and I need someone to make me a sandwich, you know?

Chris
Yes, yes. And I think the social aspects as well is just people live longer from what I understand if they are more social.

Jon
Yeah.

Chris
And sometimes, as you mentioned, it might be hard to leave the house or there’s social anxiety out there, but there could be a bot that could be that social outlet.

Jon
Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, if you’ve got a human… sort of an autonomous robot in your house that sort of looks human-ish, I guess, doesn’t have to, I suppose, but it probably would. Yeah, it could also talk to you. Yeah, that’d be interesting.

Chris
Wild times ahead for sure.

Jon
Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting. So I just hope I can afford it, so I’m saving. I’m saving for a thing that hasn’t even been invented yet. We’ll see what happens. So security is really important in the software industry now more than ever because all of everything happens online now. How does AppLink think about security as a first class concern?

Chris
Yeah, great question. Yeah. Managed security. Managed security is a huge value add for AppLink customers. And customers really appreciate Salesforce’s and Heroku’s focus on trust. They can rely on Salesforce to provide a secure boundary around their apps, around their data, and then with AppLink, we’ve extended that boundary to Heroku. So orgs and apps are securely connected. Or requests are authenticated by AppLink. Only connected orgs can invoke AppLink-managed apps. And so essentially AppLink is zero trust out of the box. So we’re really excited about that.

Jon
Yeah, good.

Chris
And also in our roadmap is including Salesforce Private Connect to AppLink apps. So Private Connect will further secure org to app requests so the requests travel over the private internet not public internet. So that’s… we’re looking forward to that.

Jon
Oh nice okay. That’s great. So as a developer yourself what’s a small detail or feature in AppLink that you’re particularly proud of, even if it’s something most users might not ever notice?

Chris
Yeah, it’s just a good question. AppLink, there’s many things that make up it as a cohesive product. One of the things that I love that really stands out to me is the SDKs. So developer experience, as you certainly know, Jon, is very important at Heroku.

Jon
Right. Yeah.

Chris
With AppLink’s SDKs, developers can begin writing code, solving their business use cases on the first line of their app. And that makes me smile because they don’t have to worry about, again, the plumbing. We take care of that. So SDKs are powerful and they complete the product. And I think developers will really appreciate it.

Jon
Yeah, I agree they will. All right. Final question Chris. Here we go. So as you’re looking ahead at AppLink, what’s one feature or maybe possible change for AppLink that you’re personally excited about, even if it’s just a thought in your head right now, maybe it’s not even maybe on the release roadmap or something yet?

Chris
Yeah, Salesforce packaging of Heroku apps.

Jon
Oh okay.

Chris
Make Heroku apps and apps as agents available on AppExchange and AgentExchange.

Jon
Okay.

Chris
And then installed Heroku apps are automagically wired up and secured by AppLink, and installed apps are wired up and secured by Heroku Eventing to consume org events. And so this is one really key way for our partners to grow their business by packaging Heroku apps. That’s what I’m really looking forward to in the coming year.

Jon
Wow okay. That would be really interesting. Cool. All right, Chris, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Chris
It’s been great, Jon.

Jon
All right. Have a good day.

Chris
Thanks, bye.

Narrator
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Code[ish] podcast. Code[ish] is produced by Heroku. The easiest way to deploy, manage, and scale your applications in the cloud. If you’d like to learn more about Code[ish] or any of Heroku’s podcasts, please visit heroku.com/podcasts.