Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating a Client Proxy
Problem
You are tired of doing all of this work by hand to create your SOAP invocation with SAAJ.
You want to have Java generate everything necessary for you to invoke a service based only
on its WSDL.
Solution
Use the
wsimport
tool to generate the necessary client-side stubs and invoke them as you
would a regular Java object.
Discussion
When you are new to web services the whole enterprise can be very daunting. This discussion
will walk you through the use of the
wsimport
tool from a client developer's perspective. It
will touch on schema, JAXB, and how the parts hook up together under the hood so that you
will have enough of a foundation going forward to know which items you need to concern
yourself with and what gets taken care of for you.
The
wsimport
tool will read the WSDL of a deployed web service and generate the Java ob-
jects necessary to invoke it, including a class that extends
javax.xml.ws.Service
, which
provides the client view of a web service. This can be a confusing concept because we tend
to think of the service as being located on the server. But a service instance acts as a factory
to create proxies that allow you to invoke a web service as if it was local. These proxies are
sometimes referred to as SEI (Service Endpoint Interface) objects.
The tool generates portable artifacts that use only standard Java means. It will automatically
call on JAXB to create value types that map Java to XML tand the result can be used to per-
form web services operations.
