Consuming web services allows you to extend your applications and business processes with capabilities that are provided by various third parties.
For example, if your application needs to convert an address to geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), you would most likely use the Google Maps Geocoding API to do that.
Being able to consume web services can add enormous value to your applications by providing very useful extra functionality to your customers which you could not otherwise offer.
What is a RESTful Web Service?Most modern web services are RESTful web services.
REST (stands for Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for building web services. The transport for REST is always done over HTTP (unlike SOAP). HTTP verbs (GET, POST, etc.) are used to indicate the kind of operation being requested. The input and output of REST request is typically JSON texts.
REST web services are generally simple and easy to construct. It is often said that REST popularity came from developers having had enough of the complexity (and bloated nature) of SOAP.
Refer to the Consuming Web Services guide for more information.
Next see JSON Parsing.
