Using Web Services

Web services are an emerging technology that allow web pages to access distributed applications. By offering both access to information and application functionality as a service, web services can be delivered and paid for as streams of services that allow ubiquitous access from any platform. The web page that connects to the web service is commonly known as a consumer, and the service itself is known as a publisher. Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 lets you create pages and sites that are consumers of web services. Dreamweaver currently supports the creation of web-service consumers using Macromedia ColdFusion MX, ASP.NET, and Java Server Pages (JSP) document types. Specifically, Dreamweaver allows you to perform the following web service development tasks:

• Select web services available on the Internet.
• Generate a web service proxy that allows the web page to communicate with the web service publisher.

  The proxy (also known as an abstraction class) contains the fields, methods, and properties of the web service, and makes them available to the locally hosted page. When you generate a proxy for your page, Dreamweaver lets you view them in the Components panel.

• Drag methods and data types into the page’s code.

Before you create a web page that uses a web service, you must be familiar with the underlying server technology of the application you want to use and the programming constructs that the application requires.

Dreamweaver allows you to author web pages that can access web services and make use of the functionality the services provide. In addition, you can create and publish web services for deployment using Macromedia ColdFusion MX.

This chapter contains the following sections:

About web services

About proxy generators

Adding a web service proxy using the WSDL description

Adding a web service to a page

Editing the UDDI web service site list