Web services_5

A Web service exposes a software component to remote systems in a platform-independent

manner, meaning that any application server platform capable of consuming web services

can make use of the web services created with ColdFusion MX. ColdFusion MX truly rang the

bell with its implementation of Web services: To create a Web service in MX, you simply set

the Access attribute of a ColdFusion component function to Remote. No, really!

You need to pay attention to a few details, of course, but creating a Web service is a natural

extension to ColdFusion's component functionality. Whenever a ColdFusion component is

accessed as a Web service, the remote consumer of the Web service receives the result in the

native format of the consumer's platform, so .NET consumers receive ColdFusion arrays as

.NET arrays, and Java consumers receive them as Java arrays.

Some incompatibilities do exist between certain ColdFusion complex data types and specific

consumer platforms, but these hurdles can be cleared by exchanging complex data as XML

documents that the consumer may then transform as needed.

One piece of advice: Learn Web services, XSLT transformations

, and how to validate XML documents against DTDs by using COM. These

skills may sound foreign to you now, but they're soon to be in very high demand, and we

want you there to provide the necessary solutions.