I knew there are some issues with using onRequest in your Application.cfc and web services, but I didn't think there were any issues with onRequestStart and ColdFusion 8 SOAP web services.

Today while working on one of my clients web services I started getting the error org.xml.sax.

I just noticed PostalMethods a new SOAP web service / API for sending snail mail via the US Postal Service. This service is from the folks at InterFax who have a nice web service for sending Faxes as well.

I received a questions in my email today from blog reader, Rob Rawlins:

A client of mine wants me to change the SOAP web service I publish into a REST service, and I dont even know where to begin.

I just got a brand new Mac Pro yesterday - I spent most of yesterday installing stuff, but today I was trying to get a little work done... I ran into a problem when trying to invoke web services on CF8 - it threw the following error:

coldfusion.jsp.

I am seeing a lot of new web services are implemented using a REST style architecture these days rather than a SOAP one. Lets step back a second and explain what REST is.

Textamerica has released their new developer api for mobloggers. They are also giving a $500 prize to the first 20 applications (with source code) which we deem to be the most useful to the Textamerica Community as a whole.

The first example app is a Textamerica4j by David Czarneck.

That's what WDDX stands for. It was created in 1998 by the folks at Allaire (headed by Simeon Simeonov) 7 years later the web is just starting to embrace the concept. Granted, not many folks are using WDDX, rather they are using SOAP, or REST web services.

If you tried using the Yahoo Web Services with CFHTTP and your cfhttp.filecontent variable had the value: Connection Failure, or if you had throwonerror="true" and you got the error: Connection Failure: Status code unavailable it is due to an encoding issue.

I am now a contributer to the API Blog.

My most recent post is about the 43 Things Web Service that was just released.

If you haven't checked out 43 Things it's a pretty cool web site where you can share info about common goals you have.

Google has launched a new site called Google Code it is Google's place for Open Source software.

Right now all the projects listed are mostly C/C++, with one Python project.

You may have noticed in the last few weeks I have had something at the bottom of my posts called Related Books Beta. Let me explain how I did that.

I play around a lot with Amazon web services (have you seen my site to find amazon deals?).

JWS files are nothing more than a Java class with a .jws extension. But when placed on a web server with Axis installed (such as ColdFusion MX), you can expose that class as a web service. This works just like CFC's do in ColdFusion. Here's an example JWS we will call CaseService.