With our Winter '07 just around the corner, I am beginning a series of posts to highlight some of the great new features in our 8.0 API.

For this release, we have made an effort to incorporate all of the most commonly requested enhancements.  The result is our biggest, most ambitious release of the API ever!   Here are some of the highlights:

• SOQL Relationships – Now you can create SOQL queries that filter on and retrieve data from related records in a single call -- retrieve an account and all its related opportunities and contacts with a single query.   This is an object-oriented answer to SQL Joins for SOQL.
• AJAX Toolkit – Now you can access the API from javascript easily using our high performance AJAX toolkit.  This ground-up rewrite is 3-5x faster than our beta AJAX toolkit and supports synchronous and asynchronous calls.
• Upsert with Relationships – Enhanced upsert call allows you to insert or update records and their relationships using foreign IDs from an external system.  Integrating with a legacy system has never been easier!
• ConnectOut - ConnectOut allows you to use workflow to trigger outbound Web Service calls to and SOAP endpoint you define.  With this, you receive near real-time notifications of changes and additions to your data at Salesforce.com without polling!
• Merge API – The merge functionality previously only available via the UI is now available via the API.  This enables customers to provide their own logic to  efficiently and reliably merge Accounts, Contacts, and Leads.
• SOQL  Enhancements – SOQL now has support for ORDER BY, LIMIT, IN, and count(), familiar to SQL developers.  toLabel() and convertCurrrency() methods allow queries to retrieve translated labels and converted currencies.
• SOSL  Enhancements – As with SOQL, SOSL now has support for ORDER BY, count(), toLabel() and convertCurrrency(). SOSL Queries can now also return data from parent records via relationships (e.g. Account name for a Contact).
• Updated Apex Explorer and Data Loader - Our popular API clients have been updated to take advantage of the new features in the 8.0 API.
• Custom Validation and Unique Fields– New features in the application such as Custom Validation rules on fields and Unique field constraints are also enforced via the API
• New Objects, New Metadata – We now expose more of our standard objects via the API (e.g. Workflow Approvals, EmailTemplate) and expose more metadata.

I will be diving into to each of these features in subsequent posts.  Stay tuned! 

In the mean time, if you want to learn more about what the new release, keep an eye on ADN.  We'll be publishing release notes and 8.0 documentation in the next couple of days. 

Let us know what you think!