| The latest buzz phrase on the Internet is "web services." Web services enable a company to publish some of its application functionality over the web. Web services clients can then use that functionality via the Internet. For example, a translation service might offer language translation web services. As a web developer, I could then call and use those web services from within my own web application. Web services feature heavily in Microsoft's .NET strategy. However, the great thing about web services is that they are platform independent. This means that our ColdFusion MX applications can use .NET web services and vice versa. ColdFusion MX enables you to both consume web services as a client and offer web services as a producer. You consume web services using either ColdFusion Script or the <CFINVOKE> tag. You can find many examples of web services on offer at the www.xmethods.net web site. To produce and publish a web service with ColdFusion MX, you use ColdFusion Components. |