Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style in which web services are viewed as resources and can be identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).

Web services developed using the REST style are known as RESTful web services. Java EE 6 added support to RESTful web services through the addition of the Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS). JAX-RS has been available as a standalone API for a while, but it became part of Java EE in version 6 of the specification.

One very common use of RESTful web services is to act as a frontend to a database, that is, RESTful web service clients can use a RESTful web service to perform CRUD (short for create, read, update, and delete) operations in a database. Since this is such a common use case, NetBeans includes outstanding support for this—allowing us to create RESTful web services that act as a database frontend with a few simple mouse clicks.

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