Tonight's Topic: Making API calls from Access to other useful applications on the internet using the REST API (application programming interface) protocol. ---- What is REST? REST stands for Representational State Transfer. (It is sometimes spelled "REST".) It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications protocol -- and in virtually all cases, the HTTP protocol is used. REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications. The idea is that, rather than using complex mechanisms such as CORBA, RPC or SOAP to connect between machines, simple HTTP is used to make calls between machines. In many ways, the World Wide Web itself, based on HTTP, can be viewed as a REST-based architecture. RESTful applications use HTTP requests to post data (create and/or update), read data (e.g., make queries), and delete data. Thus, REST uses HTTP for all four CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations. ---- Two (and of course there are many more) important functions that your Access program can tap into on the internet are email and credit card processing. The concept is very similar to accessing Excel from one of your Access applications. The difference is that you are reaching out to the application over the internet. So you can imagine that there is a lot of security built into REST protocol. ---- As with any two programs that work together, data needs to be sent back and forth. REST generally used something called JSON. JSON stands for Javascript Object Notation. If you are familiar with XML then you will understand JSON. It's the same basic idea. ---- Look at the sample Access app api_demo.accdb. In it you will find a form that makes a simple api call and then parses the JSON data it receives using a parser implemented in VBA.