Please forgive the novice-ness of this question if this is in fact a novice question, and maybe if it doesn't exist it could one day, but thank you for your time already. I'm just trying to learn how to access dynamic data for my website.
If these (command line accessible) services do exist, which I imagine is doubtful, I am looking for dynamic (externally stored) Finance & Economic data providers.
EDIT: Ah! Great. - I run both mac osx lion and windows vista on separate computers. I like ruby on rails, and the startup I'm working with uses php so that's OK too. Other than that as far as verification processes go, honestly, I'm not that far yet. The data I'll be trying to access at first will likely be open source (free for academic purposes, etc) and come from Google or Bloomberg Open if that helps. Thanks already though - Ruby on Rails runs extremely slow on Windows so I'll be using Mac for the most part.
EDIT: Are there any IDE's (or IDE plugins) which have the capability to do what Alexei is describing?
EDIT: I'll probably be trying to access Google Docs via a REST API for my starter app. But am still interested in trying to access it and any other REST source via the command line and/or an IDE!
The curl command takes a URL as its argument and issues an HTTP GET to get the resource at that address. If that HTTP request accesses a REST web service, then it displays the response from that service. You can of course build on this as your starting point.
REST/SOAP services are accessible by issueing HTTP requests. There are plenty of tools to do just that on all operating systems. Starting from telnet for barebone communication to scripting languages that provide parsed responses like Python/Ruby/JavaScript for most platforms, PowerShell scripting would be probably the best for Windows environment.
To get more specific recommendations you need to get more details in the question (OS, languages you like, authentication used by services...)