Magento introduction

I followed Magento progress from the beginning. I decided to write a series of tutorials referring for the first chapter to importing and connecting Magento to other systems... Magento API allows interaction through SOAP and XML RPC protocols. Most entities covered, so you can use the API to import/export Customers, Products, Invoices and so on... If you have an ERP system already with your products defined there and you want to expose some of them to web and sell them online (e-commerce website), well, that's what you need. Magento API is permission based, so you need to define users and roles... Also keys for accessing the web service. The authentication part looks like this:

$proxy = new SoapClient('http://mymagento.localhost/api/soap/?wsdl');
$sessionId = $proxy->login('api-user', 'your-api-key-here');

First we talk about this autentication part and then we shall import and export some products, customers maybe interaction with an open source CRM like vTiger and Sugar CRM.