Ron West

The Web services phenomenon has finally arrived. All of the developer conferences and symposiums are talking about how Web services will revolutionize the world. Well, it takes action to start a riot, and this article should set your wheels in motion. In this article, you'll learn how to locate available Web services, and systematically integrate discovered services into your existing application by using XPath to parse the services, WSDL file. First, we need a service to work with. For our example we'll focus on the RPC-style Web services as these are the most common and easiest of the Web service solutions to implement. Since UDDI is still a relatively distant option for discovering services, we will turn to our good friends over at Xmethods.net, who have an extensive listing of available Web services. Let's select the Global Ski Resort Finder (GSRF) service (a n... (more)

CFMX & Web Services

Over the next few months ColdFusion developers across the globe will be handed the keys to a next-generation Internet application development model. The culmination of over four years of work, which began even before the current release of ColdFusion went into development, it will generate a revolutionary way to develop and share application data and business logic over the Internet. For many who have been involved with CF since the early years, this model will be welcomed, and those of you who are just about to embark on your CF tour of duty are in luck. The ColdFusion MX (CFMX... (more)

Discovery of Complex Datatypes

Web services promises to change the landscape of distributed computing forever. Soon computer systems will freely exchange data independent of their language, architecture, or platform. Applications will be available on a per-use basis, and the current business model will be drastically modified as service-based computing expands the Internet into the next phase. In the technology adoption curve, we have just begun the "proof of concept" phase - a phase that will see the adoption rate of Web services increase steadily over the next 12 months. Shortly thereafter, the ability to li... (more)

Stretching Web Services to Its Limits

XML has already solidified its position in the Web application space as the solution for data extensibility, and we are becoming increasingly aware of Web services and its potential to revolutionize the distributed application architecture. What we have yet to discover is exactly how this is all going to happen. We know that the Web services architecture allows for easy integration between applications built independently from each other. We also know that sometime in the near future when we want to extend our applications, we will have a system in place that allows us to method... (more)

The Structure of Structures

ColdFusion has always been about easy access to information. From a programmer's perspective, it gives a fast and efficient way to access data and present it to end-users. As we all know, accessing data for presentation is easier if it's organized properly. We started with queries, added lists and arrays and now we have structures. Because structures are the newest organizational scheme for data in ColdFusion, I thought it important to look them over and present them to our readers. The best way to explain a structure is to say it is a one-dimensional array that uses text values... (more)