IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Get started with IBM BPM > Key concepts > Bindings > Binding types > Web service bindings

Web service bindings overview

A web service import binding allows you to call an external web service from your Service Component Architecture components. A web service export binding allows you to expose your SCA components to clients as web services.

With a web service binding, you access external services using interoperable SOAP messages and qualities of service (QoS).

You use Integration Designer to generate and configure web service bindings on imports and exports in SCA modules. The following types of web service bindings are available:

• SOAP1.2/HTTP and SOAP1.1/HTTP

  These bindings are based on Javaâ„¢ API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS), a Java programming API for creating web services.

  • Use SOAP1.2/HTTP if your web service conforms to the SOAP 1.2 specification.

  • Use SOAP1.1/HTTP if your web service conforms to the SOAP 1.1 specification.

  Important: When you deploy an application with a web service (JAX-WS) binding, the target server must not have the Start components as needed option selected. See Checking the server configuration for details.

  When you select one of these bindings, you can send attachments with your SOAP messages.

  The web service bindings work with standard SOAP messages. Using one of the web service JAX-WS bindings, however, you can customize the way that SOAP messages are parsed or written.

  For example, you can handle nonstandard elements in SOAP messages or apply additional processing to the SOAP message. When you configure the binding, you specify a custom data handler that performs this processing on the SOAP message.

  You can use policy sets with a web service (JAX-WS) binding. A policy set is a collection of policy types, each of which provides a quality of service (QoS).

  For example, the WSAddressing policy set provides a transport-neutral way to uniformly address web services and messages. You use Integration Designer to select the policy set for the binding.

  If you want to use a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) policy set, you must perform some additional configuration, as described in Importing SAML policy sets.

• SOAP1.1/HTTP

  Use this binding if you want to create web services that use a SOAP-encoded message based on Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC).

• SOAP1.1/JMS

  Use this binding to send or receive SOAP messages using a Java Message Service (JMS) destination.

Regardless of the transport (HTTP or JMS) used to convey the SOAP message, web service bindings always handle request/response interactions synchronously. The thread making the invocation on the service provider is blocked until a response is received from the provider. See "Synchronous invocation" for more information about this invocation style.

The following combinations of web service bindings cannot be used on exports in the same module.

If you need to expose components using more than one of these export bindings, you need to have each in a separate module and then connect those modules to your components using the SCA binding:

• SOAP 1.1/JMS and SOAP 1.1/HTTP using JAX-RPC
• SOAP 1.1/HTTP using JAX-RPC and SOAP 1.1/HTTP using JAX-WS
• SOAP 1.1/HTTP using JAX-RPC and SOAP 1.2/HTTP using JAX-WS

After the SCA module that contains the web service binding is deployed to the server, you can use the administrative console to view information about the binding or to change selected properties of the binding.

Web services allow applications to interoperate by using standard descriptions of services and standard formats for the messages they exchange.

For example, the web service import and export bindings can interoperate with services that are implemented using Web Services Enhancements (WSE) Version 3.5 and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Version 3.5 for Microsoft .NET. When interoperating with such services, you must ensure that:

• The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file used to access a web service export includes a non-empty SOAP action value for each operation in the interface.

• The web service client sets either the SOAPAction header or the wsa:Action header when sending messages to a web service export.

Web service bindings

Related concepts:
Synchronous invocation

Related information:
Access Web services