Java Web Services in a Nutshell

J2EE 1.4 JAX-RPC Mapping File

Availability

All J2EE 1.4 platforms.

Description

Every web service deployed on the J2EE 1.4 platform must have an associated mapping that describes how the namespaces, port types, operations, exceptions, and data types defined in the WSDL definition of the service are to be mapped to Java language packages, interfaces, methods, exception classes, and primitive or object types. In the simplest cases, it is permissible to specify only the namespace to package mapping, allowing everything else to be defaulted according to built-in rules for the WSDL to JAX-RPC mapping described in the JAX-RPC specification.

The JAX-RPC mapping file does not have a fixed name. Instead, its location is given by the wsdl-file element in the webservices.xml file in the same J2EE module. The J2EE 1.4 reference implementation allows a model file to be used instead of a mapping file. This is extremely convenient because the model file can be created automatically from a WSDL definition. Since the mapping file is complex, it is likely that other vendors will provide tool-based support for creating it.

The content of the JAX-RPC mapping file is defined by an XML Schema document that can be downloaded from http://www.ibm.com/webservices/xsd/j2ee_jaxrpc_mapping_1_1.xsd. Example 8-14 shows the elements that appear at the two outer-most nesting levels of this document.

Example 8-14. The JAX-RPC mapping file

<java-wsdl-mapping> <package-mapping/> <!-- One or more - see text --> <java-xml-type-mapping/> ...