Understanding the ${HttpDefaultPort} Token

The following section provides a little background on the ${HttpDefaultPort} token and how it's resolved when an application is deployed.

Just like the GlassFish web services, which are always deployed to a designated HTTP port (8080 is the configured default), the HTTP Binding Component also has a default HTTP port to which web services are deployed. Since the HTTP Binding Component comes with GlassFish as a pre-installed component, a default HTTP port is always assigned to it. The default port is configured in the JBI Runtime module during the installation of GlassFish, at which time it allocates an available port for each HTTP Binding Component instance in the GlassFish domain(s).

Originally, this default port setting and the ${HttpDefaultPort} token were placed in the WSDL URL to support clustering, where multiple HTTP BC instances could be running on the same machine. As such, when an application is deployed, the port token is used to resolve the actual port value to the assigned port in each instance, with no chance of port collisions.

Since then, the use of the port has evolved such that the HTTP Binding Component (the web service container in JBI) acts in a fashion that is similar to the GlassFish web service container. When an application “arrives“ in the binding component, it looks up its default HTTP port setting, and replace the token in the URL with the actual port number. If the default port number is not configured, an Initialization failed exception is thrown.