Accessibility

ColdFusion Article

 

A Beginner's Guide to Creating and Consuming Web Services with ColdFusion and Flash


Matt Boles

Matt Boles

 

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. How Web Services Work
  3. Creating a Web Service with ColdFusion
  4. WSDL Documents
  5. Adding More Complex Functionality
  6. Consuming Web Services with ColdFusion
  7. Consuming Web Services with Macromedia Flash MX 2004
  8. Conclusion
Created:
19 July 2004
User Level:
Beginner

Web Services

A web service is application functionality that can be published and consumed over the Internet. Using ColdFusion, you can easily:

  • Publish a web service – to make application functionality available for remote users to use.
  • Consume a web service – to access remote functionality to perform an application task.

ColdFusion provides an easy, straightforward way to create web services. Once you have written the web service, a number of different front ends, including ColdFusion/HTML and Flash can consume it. Other front ends, such as PDAs, mobile phones, and TVs can also consume web services.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a simple web service using ColdFusion and consume that web service using ColdFusion and Macromedia Flash MX 2004.

While this article covers several key concepts, you can learn a lot more about web services and Macromedia products by taking one of many instructor-led courses offered by a Macromedia Authorized Training Partner near you. Only at a Macromedia Authorized Training location will you learn from instructors thoroughly trained and certified by Macromedia. You can learn more in a few days with a qualified trainer than you can learn in a year with a book. Get the skills you need to get ahead - Macromedia Training and Certification.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

ColdFusion MX

Flash MX 2004

Tutorials and sample files:

Follow the steps in the ReadMe.txt file within the ZIP archive to set up the files and data source for this tutorial.

Page 1 of 8
Next Page

About the author

As a principal instructor for the Macromedia Educational Services group, Matthew Boles has been using or teaching ColdFusion for five years. Matthew has a diverse background in web development, computer networking, and teaching, in both professional computer classes and the public schools. He co-authored the Certified ColdFusion Developer Study Guide, and has recently worked as a course developer on the following official Macromedia Training courses: Developing Rich Internet Applications with Macromedia Flex, Macromedia Flash MX 2004: Application Development, FastTrack to Macromedia Flash MX, Macromedia Flash MX ActionScript, and Advanced ColdFusion MX Development.