Consuming the web service

Until now, we have created the layout for the list view and list adapter; now it is the time to worry about how to consume the web service to download the data and to hook it up to the screen. The following section will walk you through the steps on how to download data asynchronously from the web service.

An introduction to web services

Web services are one of the integral parts of the World Wide Web (WWW) infrastructure. It allows the server application to share the data or logic with connected clients via web protocols such as REST and SOAP using data formats, such as XML and JSON.

Web services expose a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provides a uniform data access mechanism for client applications. It doesn't matter which programming language the web service is written in; the client applications with different operating systems or different programming languages can access the services seamlessly, as long as they adhere to the web service...