Beginning Adobe® AIR™: Building Applications for the Adobe Integrated Runtime

7.3. Web Services

A web service is a way of exchanging data between servers with a request and response metaphor. Flex and AIR make invoking web services very easy by managing all of the SOAP packet generation. For a definition of a SOAP packet, please see below. Calling a web service is done by using the <mx:WebService> tag. As previously stated, this tag will handle the creation and parsing of the SOAP packets that are sent and received from the remote server. The example in this section uses a free web service from webservicesx.net.

7.3.1. SOAP

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol and is a protocol for data exchange in XML format. When data are sent to the remote server invoking a web service, they're sent as a SOAP packet. The results returned from the server are also in a SOAP packet. Here is an example of the SOAP packets that will be used in the example later in this section. Listing 7-10 is an example of a SOAP request, and Listing 7-11 is an example of a SOAP response.

Example 7-10. Example of a SOAP request

POST /stockquote.asmx HTTP/1.1 Host: www.webservicex.net Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: length SOAPAction: "http://www.webserviceX.NET/GetQuote" <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soap:Body> <GetQuote xmlns="http://www.webserviceX.NET/"> <symbol>string</symbol> ...