Metadata and Tooling APIs
To open the platform to better tooling for development and deployment, Salesforce introduced two important APIs – Metadata API in the Spring 2008 release and Tooling API in the Spring 2013 release. While they both fulfilled similar functions, there were some important differences in their aims and functionality.
Metadata API
At the simplest level, metadata is data that describes the structure of your data, but for the Salesforce platform, that is a bit of an oversimplification. The term metadata covers many of the configuration and customization elements of Salesforce as well – at the time of writing, Salesforce’s own Metadata Coverage Report, available at https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/metadata-coverage, indicates 601 metadata types in the platform, the vast majority of which are covered in Metadata API.
Metadata API can be used to move this metadata between environments. You can retrieve the metadata as XML files from...
