You spend quit a lot of time building your Flex application with nice layout, fancy panels, and cool animations. Then all of a sudden, you realize one thing is missing:

Where and How to get the server-side data for my Flex application?

It feels like you have just got a most powerful cannon, but no ammunition to fire.

Using Adobe Flex as a front-end RIA tool, many people are familiar with common Flex components like Panel, HBox, or TileList. However, when coming to the topic like How to Consume Web Services in Adobe Flex, you might encounter some challenges including:

• What Flex component can I use to call web services?
• What are the differences among Flex WebService, HttpService, and RemoteObject?
• What is SOAP? What is WSDL? How to interpret a WSDL and map it to Flex WebService?
• How to consume Web Services in both MXML and ActionScript?
• How to pass request parameters to Web Services from Flex?
• How to set up the return data format for Flex WebService?
• How to handle the Flex WebService events, such as result event and fault event?
• How to retrieve, sort, filter, and bind the Web Services data in Flex?
• Is there any automatic tool to simplify my work on consuming Web Services in Flex?

Over the next week, I want to write a series of 5 tutorials for Flex users facing some of the above problems – those who need to access server-side data by consuming web services in Adobe Flex and who need ammunition for their RIA cannon.

Here are the topics we will be covering over the next week:

1. Creating a Web Service Powered Flex Application in One Minute
2. Understanding Flex Web Service from A to Z
3. Mapping SOAP and WSDL to Flex WebService
4. Retrieving, Processing, and Binding Web Services Data in Flex
5. Utilizing Tools to Simplify the Work on Consuming Web Services in Flex

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Stay tuned for the next post of this tutorial series on How to Comsume Web Services in Adobe Flex.