Web services allow us to develop functionality that can be accessed across a network. What makes web services different from other similar technologies such as EJBs is that they are language and platform independent, which is to say, for example, a web service developed in Java may be accessed by clients written in other languages, and vice versa.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Introduction to web services
Creating a simple web service
Creating a web service client
Exposing EJBs as web services
Web services allow us to write functionality that can be accessed across a network in a language and platform independent way.
There are two different approaches that are frequently used to develop web services: the first approach is to use the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the second approach is to use the Representational State Transfer (REST) protocol. NetBeans supports creating web services using either approach.