Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 for XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

-based RPC

Remote procedure call

In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...

(JAX-RPC) allows a Java application to invoke a Java-based Web Service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 with a known description while still being consistent with its WSDL

Web Services Description Language

The Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a Web service. A WSDL description of a web service provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects and what data structures...

 description. It can be seen as Java RMI

Java remote method invocation

The Java Remote Method Invocation Application Programming Interface , or Java RMI, is a Java application programming interface that performs the object-oriented equivalent of remote procedure calls ....

s over Web services. JAX-RPC 2.0 was renamed JAX-WS 2.0 (Java API for XML Web Services). JAX-RPC 1 is deprecated with Java EE 6. The JAX-RPC service utilizes W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards like WSDL or Web Service Description Language

It works as follows:

1. A Java program invokes a method
   Method (computer science)
   In object-oriented programming, a method is a subroutine associated with a class. Methods define the behavior to be exhibited by instances of the associated class at program run time...
   
    on a stub
   Method stub
   A method stub or simply stub in software development is a piece of code used to stand in for some other programming functionality. A stub may simulate the behavior of existing code or be a temporary substitute for yet-to-be-developed code...
   
    (local object representing the remote service)
2. The stub invokes routines in the JAX-RPC Runtime System (RS)
3. The RS converts the remote method invocation into a SOAP message
4. The RS transmits the message as an HTTP request

The advantage of such a method is that it allows the Web Service to be implemented at server-side as a Servlet

Java Servlet

A servlet is a Java programming language class used to extend the capabilities of servers that host applications accessed via a request-response programming model. Although servlets can respond to any type of request, they are commonly used to extend the applications hosted by Web servers...

 or EJB

Enterprise JavaBean

Enterprise JavaBeans is a managed, server-side component architecture for modular construction of enterprise applications.The EJB specification is one of several Java APIs in the Java EE specification. EJB is a server-side model that encapsulates the business logic of an application...

container. Thus, Servlet or EJB applications are made available through Web services.

External links

• Sun's JAX-RPC page
• JAX-RPC 2.0 renamed to JAX-WS 2.0