Before going to detail on the client-side it is important to understand the decoupling concept that is central to Web Services. Web Services are not the best fit for internal RPC, even though they can be used in this way. There are much better technologies for this (CORBA, and RMI for example). Web Services were designed specifically for interoperable coarse-grained correspondence. There is no expectation or guarantee that any party participating in a Web Service interaction will be at any particular location, running on any particular OS, or written in any particular programming language. So because of this, it is important to clearly separate client and server implementations. The only thing they should have in common is the abstract contract definition. If, for whatever reason, your software does not adhere to this principal, then you should not be using Web Services. For the above reasons, the recommended methodology for developing a client is to follow the top-down approach , even if the client is running on the same server.

Let's repeat the process of the top-down section, although using the deployed WSDL, instead of the one generated offline by wsprovide. The reason why we do this is just to get the right value for soap:address. This value must be computed at deploy time, since it is based on container configuration specifics. You could of course edit the WSDL file yourself, although you need to ensure that the path is correct.

Offline version:

<service name='EchoService'>
<port binding='tns:EchoBinding' name='EchoPort'>
<soap:address location='REPLACE_WITH_ACTUAL_URL'/>
</port>
</service>

Online version:

<service name="EchoService">
<port binding="tns:EchoBinding" name="EchoPort">
<soap:address location="http://localhost.localdomain:8080/echo/Echo"/>
</port>
</service>

Using the online deployed version with wsconsume:

$ wsconsume -k http://localhost:8080/echo/Echo?wsdl
echo/Echo.java
echo/EchoResponse.java
echo/EchoService.java
echo/Echo_Type.java
echo/ObjectFactory.java
echo/package-info.java
echo/Echo.java
echo/EchoResponse.java
echo/EchoService.java
echo/Echo_Type.java
echo/ObjectFactory.java
echo/package-info.java

The one class that was not examined in the top-down section, was EchoService.java. Notice how it stores the location the WSDL was obtained from.

@WebServiceClient(name = "EchoService", targetNamespace = "http://echo/", wsdlLocation = "http://localhost:8080/echo/Echo?wsdl")
public class EchoService extends Service
{
private final static URL ECHOSERVICE_WSDL_LOCATION;
  
static {
URL url = null;
try {
url = new URL("http://localhost:8080/echo/Echo?wsdl");
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
ECHOSERVICE_WSDL_LOCATION = url;
}
  
public EchoService(URL wsdlLocation, QName serviceName) {
super(wsdlLocation, serviceName);
}
  
public EchoService() {
super(ECHOSERVICE_WSDL_LOCATION, new QName("http://echo/", "EchoService"));
}
  
@WebEndpoint(name = "EchoPort")
public Echo getEchoPort() {
return (Echo)super.getPort(new QName("http://echo/", "EchoPort"), Echo.class);
}
}

As you can see, this generated class extends the main client entry point in JAX-WS, javax.xml.ws.Service. While you can use Service directly, this is far simpler since it provides the configuration info for you. The only method we really care about is the getEchoPort() method, which returns an instance of our Service Endpoint Interface. Any WS operation can then be called by just invoking a method on the returned interface.

All that is left to do, is write and compile the client:

import echo.*;
..
public class EchoClient
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
if (args.length != 1)
{
System.err.println("usage: EchoClient <message>");
System.exit(1);
}
  
EchoService service = new EchoService();
Echo echo = service.getEchoPort();
System.out.println("Server said: " + echo.echo(args[0]));
} 
}

It can then be easily executed using the wsrunclient tool. This is just a convenience tool that invokes java with the needed classpath:

 
$ wsrunclient EchoClient 'Hello World!'
Server said: Hello World!
 

It is easy to change the endpoint address of your operation at runtime, setting the ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY as shown below:

...
EchoService service = new EchoService();
Echo echo = service.getEchoPort();
  
/* Set NEW Endpoint Location */
String endpointURL = "http://NEW_ENDPOINT_URL";
BindingProvider bp = (BindingProvider)echo;
bp.getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY, endpointURL);
  
System.out.println("Server said: " + echo.echo(args[0]));
...