Earlier this week, I spent an awesome three days in San Francisco at SugarCon 2011. The conference featured some great discussions, most notably the developer-focused UnCon sessions. SugarCon 2010 was great, but I remember wishing there was more hardcore-developer-focused venues for discussion and learning. UnCon met that need head-on. Special thanks to Jon Whitcraft and John Mertic for the words of wisdom and helpful answers. If you missed the conference, I highly recommend checking out the posted slides from all the presentations.

On the first day of the conference, I had the opportunity to give a short presentation on using the SugarCRM REST API. The presentation was based on a simple PHP wrapper class that I built, making it easy to create a SugarCRM client app. As you might expect, the wrapper has basic CRUD functionality (minus the deleting part), as well as support for uploading and downloading attachments for notes. Checkout the code and the presentation to try it out for yourself!

If you happen to be a Ruby on Rails fan, checkout this rails client for the REST API, based on the active record design pattern. Written by Carl Hicks and David Sulc, these guys gave a sweet presentation on the client and alluded to future improvements in the SugarCRM REST API. I’m certainly looking forward to a more robust and functional API. In the meantime, Jon Witcraft suggested a simple way to add your own API calls to your REST interface. The basic idea is, make a new class that extends SugarWebServiceImpl. Add any API call functions to the new class, and the old functions are still usable because the class extends the old SugarWebServiceImpl class.

There’s a ton of other stuff I learned at SugarCon 2011, but if I keep writing I’ll never get to try out all the new ideas. Hope you’re inspired to use the REST API and even make your own API call functions!