BEA has published the proposed final draft of Java Specification Request 181, Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform. According to the draft,
This specification defines a simplified model for Web Services programming that is easy to learn and rapid to develop. The J2EE standard deployment technologies, APIs, and protocols require the J2EE developer to master a substantial amount of information. This JSR reduces the amount of information required to implement Web Services on J2EE by using metadata to declaratively specify the Web Services that each application provides. The metadata annotates the Java source file that implements the Web Service. While the metadata is human readable and editable using a simple text editor, graphical development tools can represent and edit the Java source file using higher levels of abstraction specific to Web Services. This is a simpler and more powerful development environment than traditional coding tools that are used to develop source code using low level APIs.
This specification relies on the JSR-175 specification - “A Program Annotation Facility for the JavaTM Programming Language” - for the Web Services metadata that annotates a Web Service implementation. This document is using JSR-175 features as described in the Public Draft Specification of JSR-175.
JSR-181 defines the syntax and semantics of Web Services metadata and default values to be used, but does not define a runtime or container environment. Instead, implementers are expected to provide tools that map the annotated Java classes onto a specific runtime environment. However while this specification does not constrain the Java environment on which Web Services are run, it assumes a J2SE 5.0 compiler as well as the functionality of the J2EE 1.4 containers. In particular, JSR-181 expects features such as JAX-RPC 1.1 and JSR-109, along with the compiler and language extensions from JSR- 175 to be present.
A JSR-181 implementation must produce a deployable Java Web Service application that can run on the target Java environment. The deployed application must exhibit the proper behavior described by the Web Services metadata and Java source code. Any two JSR-181 processors starting from the same valid annotated Java Web Services file will produce equivalent Web Service applications, even though they may deploy on very different Java environments. This ensures portability of JSR-181 compliant Java files.
IBM has published a maintenance release of Java Specification Request 110, Java APIs for WSDL. This is actually a fairly major, functional update compared to most maintenance releases.