Web Services Metadata for Java

Web Services Metadata for Java platform is a Java programming language specification (JSR-181) primarily used to standardize the development of Web Services interfaces for the Java platform.

Using annotations from the JSR 181, you can annotate a Web service implementation class or a Web service interface. It enables developers to create portable Java Web Services from a simple Plain Old Java Object (POJO) class by adding annotations, and also helps in generating a Web service with a wizard or by publishing the service on to a server.

Some of the annotations specified by this JSR are:

@WebService
@WebMethod
@Oneway
@WebParam
@WebResult
@HandlerChain
@SOAPBinding

Put simply, JSR 181 is a specification to define standard and portable Web Services. It offers the following benefits:

Provide a simplified model for developing Web Services
Abstract the implementation details
Achieve robustness, easy maintenance, and high interoperability^[1]

Latest version is 2.1 released on December 15, 2009^[2]

References

Java EE 7 specifications

Web Application	Servlet JavaServer Pages Expression Language JSTL JavaServer Faces WebSocket JSON Processing

Enterprise Application	CDI Dependency Injection Bean Validation Enterprise JavaBeans JPA JMS JTA JavaMail Interceptors JCA Common Annotations Batch Applications Concurrency Utilities

Web Services	JAX-RS Enterprise Web Services JAX-WS Web Services Metadata Java API for XML Messaging JAXR

Management and Security	Java Authentication SPI Java Authorization SPI J2EE Management Debugging for Other Languages

Related Specs in Java SE	JAXB JAXP JDBC JMX JavaBeans Activation Framework Streaming API for XML