Basic Web Service Concepts - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX Develop Manual

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For more information on consuming web services, see

Basic web service concepts

You must be familiar with the underlying architecture of a web service provider in order to fully
understand how web services work.
Note: This section contains an overview of the architecture of web services. For detailed information,
consult one of the many web services books.
The following are three primary components of the web services platform:
•
SOAP (Simple Access Open Protocol)
•
WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
•
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)
The following simple figure shows how the ColdFusion MX implementation of web services
work:
The following sections describe the components shown in this figure.
Supporting web services with SOAP
SOAP provides a standard XML structure for sending and receiving web service requests and
responses over the Internet. Usually you send SOAP messages using HTTP, but you also can send
them using SMTP and other protocols. ColdFusion MX integrates the Apache Axis SOAP engine
to support web services.
The ColdFusion Web Services Engine performs the underlying functionality to support web
services, including generating WSDL files for web services that you create. In ColdFusion MX, to
consume or publish web services does not require you to be familiar with SOAP or to perform
any SOAP operations.
You can find additional information about SOAP in the W3C's SOAP 1.1 note at the following
URL:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/
"Consuming web services" on page 713.
Web services 709