WSDL Files and the Client-Side Proxy Interface

The vSphere Web Services SDK provides a set of WSDL (Web Services Description Language) files that define the vSphere Web Services API. Web-services development tools such as JAX-WS wsimport use these WSDL files to generate client-side proxy code (stubs).

The client proxy provides a language-specific interface proxy. The proxy facilitates remote method invocation, organization of object data, and other aspects of distributed, object-oriented, applications programming. Your client application calls proxy interface methods. The client proxy uses SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to exchange WSDL messages with a vSphere server.

Client-Server Communication Through a Client Proxy Interface is a representation of a client application that uses the client proxy interface to call a method. The client proxy interface is based on the WSDL definitions.

Figure 1. Client-Server Communication Through a Client Proxy Interface

To use the VMware client proxy interface, you must import the vSphere Web Services API client libraries in to your client application using the following Java statement.

import com.vmware.vim25.*;

Important: The vSphere Web Services SDK includes Java client-side proxy code (stubs) generated using the JAX-WS toolkit. If the versions of Java and JAX-WS on your development platform are the same as those used to generate the stubs shipped in the SDK, you do not have to generate stubs from the WSDL yourself. See the Developer’s Setup Guide for information about how to configure a vSphere Web Services development environment.