Reference Architecture for Customer Engagement Applications

Nibs is a sample mobile application that demonstrates how to build customer engagement applications with the Salesforce1 Platform and modern frameworks like AngularJS, Ionic, and Node.js.

You can deploy your own version of Nibs on Heroku in seconds using the Heroku button below:

Although you can start experiencing Nibs as a self-contained Ionic and Node.js application, the full power of Nibs comes through its seamless integration with your business data in Salesforce and your digital marketing campaigns in ExactTarget. To get the full integrated experience, connect Nibs to Salesforce using Heroku Connect and to ExactTarget using the Fuel SDK. Nibs provides a reference architecture for building customer engagement apps that deliver personalized user interactions and integrate seamlessly with existing business data.

Force.com is a set of tools and services that make it faster and easier to create employee-facing applications. Nibs uses Force.com for the employee-facing side of the application, including product, offer and user management. Employees can manage Nibs data in the browser or using the Salesforce1 mobile app.

Heroku provides the tools and services you need to build and deploy customer-facing applications without having to worry about infrastructure. Heroku Connect makes it easy to synchronize data with your Salesforce instance. Nibs uses Heroku to host the Node.js application, and Heroku Connect to synchronize Salesforce data.

The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud helps you make the most of every customer interaction—creating personalized, cross-channel customer journeys that deliver exceptional brand experiences. Nibs uses ExactTarget's Push Notification and JourneyBuilder to fully integrate the consumer app experience in customer journeys.

AngularJS is a leading Model-View-Controller framework for building single page web applications. Nibs uses AngularJS to structure and modularize the code of the client application.

Ionic is a UI framework that facilitates the development of Hybrid apps built with AngularJS by providing mobile components and gestures. Nibs uses Ionic as the foundation for the user interface of the client application.

Node.js allows you to easily build fast and scalable server applications in JavaScript. The server-side of Nibs is built on Node.js and exposes the application data and logic to the mobile app through a set of REST services.