How to access external data

Hello,

We have a Fuel app planned that we will have a need to read and write data to an external something. I've seen SQL data access statements so this could be a database if that's the only option. We'd like it to be a web service but I have not seen anything that says we could call web services. Does anyone know? Are there any other options for accessing external data? COM access or .Net assemblies? What things can we interface to?

Thanks for any help,
Kevin

It really depends on what you want to interface with...

You may have to write your own library, but there should be no issues with doing this.  Anything you can do with PHP you can do with CodeIgniter.  For example, PHP has a SOAP class you could use, or you could use cURL.  You might find someone has already written a PHP library or utility class to communicate with the web service you choose and it would be a trivial matter to write a CodeIgniter library class to serve as a wrapper.