A few days ago I mentioned the new SaaS features in NetBeans IDE 6.1RC2 - you can read all about it here. The gist of it, is that NetBeans has support for popular web services and basically now helps you with the plumbing of using these services within your application. This is very cool and I have since done a bit more research (NetBeans search and google) and discovered a nice tutorial, Getting Started with RESTful Web Services on Glassfish. The new tutorial shows you how to generate entity classes from a database, generating a RESTful web service from entity classes, testing the RESTful web services and finally adding a Google Map feature using the SaaS feature. Note there is another version of this using Tomcat, Getting Started with RESTful Web Services On Tomcat. An older example and a worthwhile tutorial to look at is the (Draft Document) Consuming StrikeIron Web Services Using the Visual Web Pack. I also discovered StrikeIron Visual Web Pack Demo Article. Some more informative sources can be found at SaaS UI Nodes Screenshots and Enhanced Web Services Manager. I'm really interested in this enhanced web services features and will look a bit deeper into this.
You can download NetBeans 6.1 Release Candidate 2 here.