ColdFusion Developer's Guide

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Referencing a remote web service within your ColdFusion application is called consuming web
services. Since web services adhere to a standard interface regardless of implementation
technology, you can consume a web service implemented as part of a ColdFusion application,
or as part of a .NET or Java application.
You can also create your own web services and make them available to others for remote
access, called publishing web service. Applications that consume your web service can be
implemented in ColdFusion or by any application that recognizes the web service standard.
Accessing a web service
In its simplest form, an access to a web service is similar to a function call. Instead of the
function call referencing a library on your computer, it references remote functionality over
the Internet.
One feature of web services is that they are self-describing. That means a person who makes a
web service available also publishes a description of the API to the web service as a Web
Services Description Language (WSDL) file.
A WSDL file is an XML-formatted document that includes information about the web
service, including the following information:
■ Operations that you can call on the web service
■ Input parameters that you pass to each operation
■ Return values from an operation
Consuming web services typically is a two-step process:
1. Parse the WSDL file of the web service to determine its interface.
A web service makes its associated WSDL file available over the Internet. You must know
the URL of the WSDL file defining the service. For example, you can access the WSDL
file for the TemperatureService web service at the following URL:
www.xmethods.net/sd/2001/TemperatureService.wsdl
For an overview of WSDL syntax, see “Working with WSDL files” on page 1294
2. Make a request to the web service.
The following example invokes an operation on the Temperature web service to retrieve
the temperature in zip code 55987:
1292 Using Web Services