REST (Representational state transfer) has quickly become the de facto standard for communication between services and apps. Before it, came SOAP and XMLRPC, but the two buzzwords you’ll hear over and over these days are REST and JSON.

When it comes to FileMaker, you’ve always been able to do super basic REST with the Insert from URL script step. Later down the road, FileMaker added in support for the POST method of service interaction with the httpspost:// url scheme.

While the basics are always nice to have, you can’t do much beyond access public services with what FileMaker provides natively. If you’re ever going to work with a truly powerful API such as those offered by YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Google Apps and Vimeo, then you have to use something a bit more powerful.

Fortunately, for FileMaker developers, we have a number of possibilities. One of those options is the freely available BaseElements plugin. The plugin can access pretty much access any web service and will allow you to perform the full suite of possible interactions. It uses the very popular cURL library behind the scenes and with a little bit of knowledge, you’ll be interacting with web services in no time.

If you have the need for integrating true REST client functionality within a FileMaker solution, then you’ll be glad you watched this video!

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