Web Services A Three(?) Part Tutorial Part II Reprise, Tomcat, and (maybe) SOAP Questions from Last Week “I don't get the difference between SAX and DOM

Web services are Web-based enterprise applications that use open, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data with calling clients.

The Archives section contains tutorials on older products. Topics covered include working with the XSLT Mapper, generating Visual Basic and Java clients and

This tutorial describes how to take a stateless Java class and publish it as a Web service.

An introduction to Web Services

In part one of this tutorial series, you set up your Tip of the Day Flash document and built each of the pages in the application. Part two is where the fun actually begins, because you start to make these pages actually do something. You will find out how to define web services, add them to your application, and process the results of a web service's methods. You'll also see how to use bindings in a FLA file using some of the new components. Part 2 shows you how to work with the WebServiceConnector component and how to bind data between this Data component to the other UI components that have been added to the Stage. (Part three will guide you through building the mechanism for submitting new tips to the web service.)

Web services, in the general meaning of the term, are services offered via the Web. In a typical Web services scenario, a business application sends a request to a service at a given URL using the SOAP protocol over HTTP. The service receives the request, processes it, and returns a response. An often-cited example of a Web service is that of a stock quote service, in which the request asks for the current price of a specified stock, and the response gives the stock price. This is one of the simplest forms of a Web service in that the request is filled almost immediately, with the request and response being parts of the same method call.