Web Services Addressing support

The Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) support in WebSphere Application Server provides the environment for Web services that use the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) WS-Addressing specifications. This family of specifications provide transport-neutral mechanisms to address Web services and to facilitate end-to-end addressing. You do not normally need to be aware of the underlying WS-Addressing support because WebSphere Application Server will ensure that your Web service applications are WS-Addressing compliant when required. Read this topic, and other WS-Adressing and Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) topics, only if you need to use the WS-Addressing support directly. For example, if you have one of the following roles:

• A Web service developer who needs to use the WS-Addressing application programming interfaces (APIs) to create endpoint references within an application, and then use these references to target Web service resource instances. For example, a WSRF application developer.

• A system programmer who needs to use the WS-Addressing system programming interfaces (SPIs) to perform more advanced WS-Addressing operations, such as specifying message addressing properties on Web services messages.

Features of the WS-Addressing support

• Java representations of WS-Addressing endpoint references.

  • You can easily create Java endpoint reference instances at run time based on the deployment environment of the application. You do not have to specify the URI of the endpoint reference. Additionally, endpoint references can represent highly available or workload-managed objects.

  • Run time and tooling to provide appropriate mapping between the Java and XML representations of an endpoint reference. This mapping ensures that endpoint references displaying on application Web service interfaces are appropriately serialized and deserialized to or from SOAP automatically.

  • You can configure client JAX-RPC Stub or Call objects with a WS-Addressing endpoint reference. Future invocations on the client Stub or Call object are targeted at the endpoint that is represented by the endpoint reference. The invocations also automatically conform to the WS-Addressing specification (namespace) that is associated with that endpoint reference.

• Java support for endpoint references that represent Web Services Resource (WS-Resource) instances.

  • You can associate reference parameters with an endpoint reference at the time of its creation, to correlate it with a particular resource instance.

  • In targeted Web services, you can extract the reference parameters of an incoming message, so that the Web service can route the message to the appropriate WS-Resource instance.

The support for extended WS-Addressing system development using the SPI provides the following features:

• Reasoning and manipulation of endpoint references beyond what is available at the application programming level.

  • You can manipulate the contents of the endpoint reference, as specified by the WS-Addressing specification.

  • You can associate a WS-Addressing namespace, and therefore specification behavior, with an endpoint reference.

• Java representations of the WS-Addressing message addressing properties.

  • You can specify WS-Addressing message addressing properties for outbound Web service messages. In the targeted Web service, you can extract message addressing properties from inbound Web service messages.

  • You can specify the WS-Addressing namespace of an outbound WS-Addressing message, although in most cases the namespace is automatically derived based on the target endpoint reference. In a targeted Web service, you can acquire the WS-Addressing namespace of an incoming message.

Support for WS-Addressing specifications and interoperability

By default, WebSphere Application Server supports the W3C WS-Addressing 1.0 Core and SOAP Binding specifications that are identified by the http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing namespace. Unless otherwise stated, WS-Addressing semantics that are described in this documentation refer to these specifications.

For interoperability, other levels of the WS-Addressing specification are supported in this version of WebSphere Application Server; in particular, the WS-Addressing W3C submission with the namespace http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing. In addition, WebSphere Application Server supports the following features from the WS-Addressing Web Services Description Language (WSDL) binding specification:

• The wsaw:UsingAddressing extensibility element, on the WSDL Binding element only. The supported namespaces for this element are the http://www.w3.org/2006/02/addressing/wsdl namespace and, if you have fix pack V6.1.0.2 or later, the http://www.w3.org/2006/05/addressing/wsdl namespace.

• The wsaw:Action extensibility element. The supported namespaces for this element are the http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing namespace, the http://www.w3.org/2006/02/addressing/wsdl namespace and, if you have fix pack V6.1.0.2 or later, the http://www.w3.org/2006/05/addressing/wsdl namespace.

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