SugarCRM is the world's leading open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software provider, with over 5,000 customers and 500,000 downloads of the SugarCRM application all around the world. SugarCRM has long had a very useful Web Services framework, allowing applications to access the SugarCRM instance and work with data on it. But new to SugarCRM 5.2 is a framework for accessing other outside Web services from inside the application itself. SugarCRM 5.2 ships with a LinkedIn connector by default that uses this framework. Thus, users of the SugarCRM instance can check on the LinkedIn status of various companies, contacts, and leads they might have. In this article, learn how the connectors framework works in Sugar 5.2 by building an example connector that allows users to see any recent Google News items pertaining to companies in their SugarCRM instance.

SugarCRM is the world's leading open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software provider, with over 5,000 customers and 500,000 downloads of the SugarCRM application all around the world. In December 2009, SugarCRM released version 5.5 of the application suite, which completely revitalized the Web Services platform. The changes include a faster, easier-to-use API, the ability to easily extend the API that is presented to a Web service client, and the addition of REST support. In this article, you'll take a look at what REST is and how to use the REST support in the Web Services API to interact with a SugarCRM instance.