The techniques and examples in this chapter have been varied, but all center on the primary theme of data integration. As e-commerce applications become more sophisticated and web-based businesses grow more competitive, the advanced functionality we've covered here becomes increasingly important. Django's rapid development nature and excellent community makes implementation of these tools faster and easier than ever before.

Building a RESTful data API is important for transmitting data between different systems and machines. This data could be shared across the Web or across an internal corporate network. It could support applications built in another department or in an affiliate-marketing style. A data API unlocks our information for whomever we wish to share it with.

Feeds allow a similar kind of data transmission, though on a somewhat higher level than a data API. It can let human users, in addition to machines, parse our data and is an increasingly popular delivery mechanism for consuming content.

Generating visual reports is a still higher-level form of communicating our data, specifically geared for human use. The tools we've discussed could allow an e-commerce platform to automatically send sales reports to interested members of an organization or to produce other metrics suitable for printing and hard-copy distribution.

Finally, integration with a web-based service like Salesforce.com demonstrates how our e-commerce applications can transmit, receive, and interact with other related applications. Increasingly, web-based third-party services are a cost-effective method of analyzing, managing, and working with large volumes of information. Integrating our application demonstrates Django's flexibility in this area.