Restful Applications... Can I create tests from existing code ...?

[russpet]

I have an existing RESTful web application set up in a netbeans 6.8 project.

I am exploring the possibility of using Netbeans to run RESTful tests against the app. So far all I see in Netbeans tutorials is how to *create* a new RESTful application from a database application. (And then test against the newly created app.)

fyi, When I right-click on the project node, the menu option for "Test RESTful Web Services" is grayed out.

What I'd like to do is programmatically launch a series of different requests (for system level tests - not unit tests) and validate the response XML data with XMLunit. (Unless someone has a better idea.)
Would I use JAX-WS api's?

Can someone point me to a good tutorial for this?

I'm relatively new to JUnit in Netbeans.

Thanks,
Russ