We will create a simple soap web service with richer data types ( List and a user defined class) using wsimport we will generate the client side stubs. In this lab, we will create an employee service that will return employee details based on employee numbers.

The jax-ws tools wsgen and wsimport generate artifacts for easy for web service development, deployment, and invocation.

Previously with JAX-RPC, frameworks like axis 1 had tools like wsdl1java and java2wsdl, but we should consider only jax-ws tools now.

The @SOAPBinding annotation can be used in a Service Endpoint Interface (SEI) to configure the soap binding style, encoding and parameter style; and we does this using style, use and parameterStyle attributes respectively.

WSDL stands for Web service Description Language. A WSDL document is a contract between a SOAP–based web service and its consumers. A WSDL document provides critical information such as service endpoint, service operations, data types required for operations, description of messages exchanged, and underlying service pattern (request/response, solicit/response etc). The WSDL document is useful for both creating and executing clients against a web service.

A message Exchange Pattern (MEP) is a pattern for the exchange of messages between two communicating parties like a server and a client. The most common such pattern is the request-response pattern where the client sends a request and the server sends a response back. From a server perspective this is an input-output operation. Based on different combinations of input and output, the WSDL specification defines 4 patterns: