>It's my understanding that Web Services uses a "Web Services Description Language (WSDL)" file. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

UPS has a Web service, which means, they exposed their functionality via HTTP. Unfortunately, they didn't use SOAP web services, and SOAP is what uses the WSDL.

Seperating the technologies in marketing terms is difficult, but here's the quick answer.

Web services, at their simplest, are HTTP and XML. HTTP is used to call to a program and XML is used to pass parameters and send return values.

SOAP is a technology that gives Web services a standard way of being created and called, and thats what uses the WSDL.

For example, someone can tell you a UPS has a web service at www.ups.com/webservice.asp. Now, you need to learn what parameters to pass to that ASP and what it will return, and in UPS's case, I hear its pretty messy.

With SOAP, a cool thing happens, you tell it the URL to the WSDL file, and now you have both a program readable description of whats in the Web service and a human readable, since the WSDL is atually an XML document. With Intellisense, its even nicer, you're able to see this stuff as you type. Here is what SOAP calls look like:

loWS = NEWOBJECT("Wsclient",HOME()+"ffc\_webservices.vcx")
oWebService = loWS.SetupClient("http://www.foxcentral.net/foxcentral.wsdl", ;
   "foxcentral", "foxcentralSoapPort")

?oWebService.GetItemEx(539)

Familiar OO code.