Making deployed web services applications available to clients

You can publish WSDL files to the file system. If you are a client developer or a system administrator, you can use WSDL files to enable clients to connect to web services.

Before you begin

The publish WSDL administrative console panel supports both JAX-RPC and JAX-WS services. The publish WSDL panel generates a compression file that contains WSDL files for all modules in an application that contains JAX-WS or JAX-RPC web services. Read about providing the HTTP endpoint URL information to learn how the URL information affects the content of the published WSDL.

To publish a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file you need an enterprise application, also known as an enterprise archive (EAR) file, that contains a Web services-enabled module and has been deployed into WebSphere® Application Server. To learn how to deploy web services, see the deploying web services applications onto application servers information.

About this task

The purpose of publishing the WSDL file is to provide clients with a description of the web service, including the URL identifying the location of the service.

After installing a web services application, and optionally modifying the endpoint information, you might need WSDL files containing the updated endpoint informations to make deployed web services application to be available to clients.

Before you publish a WSDL file, you can configure web services to specify endpoint information in the form of URL fragments to enable full URL specification of WSDL ports. Refer to the tasks describing configuring endpoint URL information.

The WSDL files for each web services-enabled module are published to the file system location you specify. You can provide these WSDL files to clients that want to invoke your Web services.

You can specify endpoint information for HTTP ports, for Java™ Message Service (JMS) ports, or you can directly access enterprise beans that are acting as web services.

Procedure

  1. Configure the web services client bindings.
  2. Configure the URL endpoint information for HTTP bindings.
    Do one of the following depending on what kind of bindings you are using:
    • [AIX Solaris HP-UX Linux Windows][z/OS]Configure the URL endpoint information for HTTP bindings.
    • Configure the URL endpoint information for JMS bindings.
    • [AIX Solaris HP-UX Linux Windows][z/OS]Configure the URL endpoint information to directly access enterprise beans.
  3. Externalize or publish the WSDL file out of the application.
    You can complete this task in the following ways:
    • [AIX Solaris HP-UX Linux Windows][z/OS]Publish a WSDL file with the administrative console
    • [AIX Solaris HP-UX Linux Windows][z/OS]Publish a WSDL file using a URL.
    • Publish a WSDL file with the wsadmin tool.

What to do next

Apply security to your web services. To learn more, see the securing web services applications using message level security information.