Chapter 10. Calling Web Services from Flash Remoting

Cooking is a topic that everyone is familiar with. When you cook dinner, you are creating a meal from scratch. You take the ingredients, mix them together, cook them, and serve them. In many cases, this can be the preferred method of getting food on the table. Sometimes, however, it's simpler to pick up the phone and call for food, such as when you are staying in a hotel. Utilizing a prebuilt web service is like ordering room service: someone else has done the work for you, and all you have to do is consume the results.

Creating remote services for your Flash Remoting applications and connecting to them has been the focus of the previous chapters. We were, in effect, cooking our meals from scratch. Flash Remoting also works with prebuilt web services that you might find on the Internet. Web services are based on the Standard Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This protocol is spoken fluently by Flash Remoting and your application server.