Setting up development environment for calling REST API

[ricb]

I am new to the Salesforce REST API (and Salesforce development in general), and I am working to set up my development environment for making/testing calls against the REST API.

In reading over the Getting Started with the Force.com REST API document, it appears that I need a public endpoint with an SSL certificate in place to even do the most basic development prototype (in order to do the OAuth step, which is of course a pre-requsite to all other calls).

Is that right? Is there no way to start developing and testing without setting up a publicly available web server with SSL in place?

Thanks much.

[Pat Patterson · Accepted solution]

Hi ricb,

You can actually dispense with https if-and-only-if the server hostname is localhost, so URLs such as http://localhost:8443/RestTest/oauth/_callback will work just fine. This feature was added since that article was written; I'll go update the article right now...

(And localhost works fine for testing, since it's only the browser that needs to see it. And, if/when you want a public endpoint for testing, Heroku works really well for this, since Piggyback SSL is free).

Cheers,

Pat