Douglas,
Also, does the Web Service you’re connecting to have to have been set up using the JAX-WS libraries?
No, that is not required. That’s a fundamental web service benefit, they could be written in PHP and you can consume them in Java using JAX-WS, XFire, CXF, JAX-RS, etc. Of course, there are limitations and mismatches, but most standards compliant services and frameworks will work well with each other.
If you go through our XFire client tutorial, you will see an example where we’ve connected to Microsoft’s Terra Service. You can use JAX-WS to generate the client instead, here is the WSDL location: http://terraservice.net/TerraService2.asmx?WSDL
We recently presented at Eclipse World, where I demonstrated connecting to Amazon’s S3 service (which is very *real world*) with JAX-WS. More details here: http://www.myeclipseide.com/module-htmlpages-display-pid-379.html
The JAX-WS libraries have been taken from project Metro http://metro.dev.java.net which has replaced the JWSDP; so you can be sure that JAX-WS (which is part of the JEE 5 spec) and Project Metro (which contains the JAX-WS RI) are here to stay.
Hope this helps, let us know if you need more information.