Find your web service
You may have been given the details of a web service, but in many
cases the developer will need to identify a suitable web service.
Fortunately there are several web service repositories which act as
brokers for service providers. In some cases the web services are freely
available, but high value services may come at a cost, usually by
subscription.
To demonstrate the process we will look at the web services hosted by
WebServiceX. On their site you
can find a wide range of web services fulfilling a range of business
functions.
If you browse to a particular function you are interest in you are
presented with full details of the service and an opportunity to test it
using an online form. More importantly there are direct links to the
information that is required by your development tools to integrate the
web service into your page.
The test form (non-functioning) for the Global Weather web service is shown below:
GetWeather
Get weather report for all major cities around the world.
Test
To test the operation using the HTTP POST protocol, click the 'Invoke' button.
The limitation of the test form is that it returns XML formatted
results over which you have no control. The point of web services is
that you use them behind the scenes (not from a form) to build your page
content. For this we need some form of active page.