With the ubiquitous nature of the Internet in the modern world, software developers are having to build connected applications more and more frequently. It's not enough to have standalone applications nowadays. Customers are demanding applications that can talk to other systems and that can mine data from multiple sources, bringing data together as valuable information.
Not long ago, XML was considered the answer to any integration problem with SOAP web services being hailed as the preferred integration mechanism. Despite SOAP's claims to be "simple", REST-based APIs have become increasingly common, with them generally offering an easier integration solution than SOAP-based web services. One of the major advantages of REST-based web services is their ability to return JSON data that can be consumed directly by JavaScript-based APIs.
Fortunately, NetBeans provides developers with an abstraction above all of these technologies and a Java-centric approach to invoking web services...