Web services are an emerging technology that allow web pages to access distributed applications. By providing functionality as a service that a web page connects to and uses as needed, web services give developers and service providers greater flexibility in designing and deploying powerful, distributed applications. Web services can be delivered and paid for as streams of services that allow ubiquitous access from any platform, regardless of operating system or programming language. Examples of web services, and the information and functionality they provide, include the following:

• User authentication and authorization

• Credit card validation

• Financial markets services that return stock prices associated with specified ticker symbols

• Purchasing services that allow users to order products online

• Information services that provide news or other information types based on a selected interest, location, or other personal information

Before you create a web page that uses a web service, you must be familiar with the underlying server technology of your application and the programming constructs that the application requires.

The web page that connects to the web service is commonly known as a consumer, and the service itself is known as a publisher. Dreamweaver lets you create pages and sites that are consumers of web services. Dreamweaver lets you create web-service consumers that use ColdFusion, ASP.NET, and JavaServer Pages (JSP) document types, and publish and deploy web services using ColdFusion. Specifically, Dreamweaver lets you perform the following web service development tasks:

• Select web services available on the Internet.

• Generate a web service proxy that allows the web page to communicate with the web service publisher.

  The proxy (also known as an abstraction class) contains the fields, methods, and properties of the web service, and makes them available to the locally hosted page. When you generate a proxy for your page, Dreamweaver lets you view them in the Components panel.

• Drag methods and data types into the web page’s code.