Java EE Web Service Standards (Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9 Administration Guide)

Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9 Administration Guide

Java EE Web Service Standards

Java API for XML-based remote procedure calls (JAX-RPC) uses an XML-based protocol for client-server remote procedure calls. JAX-RPC enables SOAP-based interoperable and portable web services. Developers use the JAX-RPC programming model to develop SOAP-based web service endpoints, along with corresponding WSDL descriptions, and clients. A JAX-RPC based web service can interact with clients that are not based on Java. Conversely, a JAX-RPC based client can interact with a non-Java-based web service implementation.

Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 is the successor to JAX-RPC that provides an “integrated stack” of APIs for developing web services, including:

JAXB 2.0-based data binding.
Support for the latest W3C and WS-I standards such as SOAP 1.2 and WSDL 1.2.
Ease-of-development features using annotations.
An improved handler framework, support for asynchronous RPC and non-HTTP transports.
JSR 109 support.

SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) enables developers to produce and consume messages conforming to the SOAP 1.1 specification and SOAP with Attachments note. SAAJ provides an abstraction for handling SOAP messages with attachments. Advanced developers can use SAAJ to have their applications operate directly with SOAP messages. Attachments may be complete XML documents, XML fragments, or MIME-type attachments. In addition, SAAJ allows developers to enable support for other MIME types. JAX technologies, such as JAX-RPC, internally use SAAJ to hide SOAP complexities from developers. SAAJ enables:

Synchronous request-response messaging: the client sends a message and then waits for the response.
One-way asynchronous messaging: the client sends a message and continues with its processing without waiting for a response.

JSR 109 (Implementing Enterprise Web Services) facilitates building interoperable web services in the Java EE environment. It standardizes the deployment of Web services in a Java EE container. JSR-109 builds upon JAX-RPC to define a standard mechanism for deploying a web service in Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) and servlet containers. Application Server supports managing JSR 109 applications based on either JAX-RPC or JAX WS 2.0.

JSR 181 (Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform) defines an annotated Java format that uses Java Language Metadata to enable easy definition of Java web services in a Java EE container.