The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Web Service Clients

A web service client can access a Java EE application in two ways. First, the client can access a web service created with JAX-WS. (For more information on JAX-WS, see Chapter 16, Building Web Services with JAX-WS.) Second, a web service client can invoke the business methods of a stateless session bean. Message beans cannot be accessed by web service clients.

Provided that it uses the correct protocols (SOAP, HTTP, WSDL), any web service client can access a stateless session bean, whether or not the client is written in the Java programming language. The client doesn’t even “know” what technology implements the service: stateless session bean, JAX-WS, or some other technology. In addition, enterprise beans and web components can be clients of web services. This flexibility enables you to integrate Java EE applications with web services.

A web service client accesses a stateless session bean through the bean’s web service endpoint implementation class. By default, all public methods in the bean class are accessible to web service clients. The @WebMethod annotation may be used to customize the behavior of web service methods. If the @WebMethod annotation is used to decorate the bean class’s methods, only those methods decorated with @WebMethod are exposed to web service clients.

For a code sample, see A Web Service Example: helloservice.