Exposing EJBs as web services - EJB 3 in Action - page 288

With either document or RPC, you'll have to choose one of the two encoding options: lit-
eral or encoded. With document you should use literal and with RPC you should use en-
coded. Choose document literal if you're writing web services that interoperate with other
platforms and languages, especially .NET. Don't use document encoded—no one uses it
and it has practically no support.
WSDL structure
The WSDL is central to SOAP-based web services because it provides a complete blueprint
of a service. It provides such a complete description of a web service that both the client
and server code can be automatically generated. The code that's generated will handle mar-
shaling of the message and actually sending it. The structure of a WSDL file is shown in
figure 8.3 , and an example WSDL document for the BidService can be found later in
listing 8.4 .
Figure 8.3. Structure of a WSDL document