Retrieving JSON from a web URL

Question

This may be a terribly uninformed question, brace yourself. A company I'm working with has given an 'API' that I can use to access orders, however, there are only two real commands, getorders and getorderdetails. These commands are put in the format of www.server.com/path/to/the/orderapi/getorders/UniqueKey/

If I go to that web address, I'm prompted for a username and password, and once authenticating, get presented with a page of JSON formatted order details, contained in the body of the html page. I would like a service to check this information and create orders in our crm based on it, is there an obvious way to access it without the browser/client interaction?

Update: We intended to Use Biztalk to consume this resource but after a bit of research and experimenting have decided to use a different service (WDSL), mainly because Biztalk doesn't seem to have terribly great support for Restful webservices. If anyone with more knowledge of the subject would like to chime in that's fine by me.

Update 2: Noticed that this thread http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2320274/microsoft-biztalk-server-vnext-after-2009-r2-feature-request on stackoverflow is basically a feedback thread of biztalk 2009-r2, and one of the requests is support for restful web services, so I don't think there is a graceful solution for restful services in biztalk.

Answer 1

Use your language of choice, along with some library that speaks HTTP, and start hacking away?

In PHP, you'd use the build-in cURL library to make the HTTP requests. You'd grab the JSON data, run it through json_decode() to create native PHP datatypes, and then operate on them at will, doing whatever you need to do to create orders in your CRM.