How to connect 2 REST api's together - json

Question

I am working on an online shop using 3dcart, i want to connect the store to an inventory management store called ChannelGrabber. Channel Grabber has provided me with a public and private key with some bits of their API.
$ curl -v -X POST -d "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=f836e7675c46adbc33d98e32c06dfc6f&client_secret=2f4e72f89bda7f15062a2ba9d107adb5" https://api.orderhub.io/accessToken
> POST /accessToken HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: api.orderhub.io
> Accept: */*
> Content-Length: 119
> Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
>
< ...response headers...
{
"access_token": "aVSyKhKNPi5XXJqlIMCNfeZwSfvTvasTcWyX2lv2",
"token_type": "Bearer",
"expires_in": 3600
}
$ curl -v -X GET -H "Authorization: Bearer aVSyKhKNPi5XXJqlIMCNfeZwSfvTvasTcWyX2lv2" https://api.orderhub.io/ping
> GET /ping HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: api.orderhub.io
> Accept: */*
> Authorization: Bearer aVSyKhKNPi5XXJqlIMCNfeZwSfvTvasTcWyX2lv2
>
< ...response headers...
pong
3d cart have provided the following git project has an example of how to connect up to their clients API. https://github.com/3dcart/REST-API-Client/tree/master/3dCartRestAPIClient.
My issue is that i have basically no idea on how to go about connecting the 2 services up. What language to use other then using Json but i'm not even sure that is possible, I'm only still a student and still quite new to the world of programming so i don't want to have to say i can't do this project and i would quite like to learn how to do this.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

I was asking myself a similar question some time ago. I am already familiar with basic requesting of rest apis using python. I want to connect the apis of an online sales tool called pipedrive and a tool for generating invoices and bills called billomat. both come with a sophisticated rest api and I know how to get data from them or create new data into them.
If I now create a python script on my local computer I can imagine what I'd have to code to pull eg customer data from pipedrive and create this customers data into billomat. The thing now is that this process is completely manual.
To have the process be completely automatic, I came to the following conclusion:
Use webhooks in pipedrive to send out data when certain events are happening
the data can only be sent to a url which generally should also be a rest api
this url cannot be billomat directly because it wont unterstand or know what to do with the data
thats why I decided to code a litte api myself and host it on my private webserver
this api receives data from pipedrive, processes it, eg maps field names from a customers record to the corresponding field names in billomat, and then sends the prepared data over to billomat in a format that it expects and understands
I know this does not directly answer the OPs question, but would be my suggestion for a fully automatic solution in case you cannot alter the behaviour of at least one of the two apis you'd like to connect.

Answer 2

REST (Representational state transfer) is a way of interfacing your data. The idea is that the action should be defined by the HTTP request method (GET, PUT, POST etc.), while the URL should have no verb/action, just kind of data.
JSON is just the way of communication between server and client. It's like 2 people deciding to speak the same language.
Now, in your client, you can make requests to as many services as you need, and interpret the results. This can be achieved in virtually any programming language. You will find a lot of libraries for both handling HTTP request and parsing JSON responses.
As for the right direction. Pick a programming language you are more familiar with (if it's hard to decide I would recommend python which is fairly easy to start with) and look for libraries for sending HTTP request and parsing json strings.