This class represents an WS-Addressing EndpointReference which is a remote reference to a web service endpoint. See Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core for more information on WS-Addressing EndpointReferences.

This class is immutable as the typical web service developer need not be concerned with its contents. The web service developer should use this class strictly as a mechanism to reference a remote web service endpoint. See the Service APIs that clients can use to that utilize an EndpointReference. See the Endpoint, and BindingProvider APIs on how EndpointReferences can be created for published endpoints.

Concrete implementations of this class will represent an EndpointReference for a particular version of Addressing. For example the W3CEndpointReference is for use with W3C Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core Recommendation. If JAX-WS implementors need to support different versions of addressing, they should write their own EndpointReference subclass for that version. This will allow a JAX-WS implementation to create a vendor specific EndpointReferences that the vendor can use to flag a different version of addressing.

Web service developers that wish to pass or return EndpointReference in Java methods in an SEI should use concrete instances of an EndpointReference such as the W3CEndpointReference. This way the schema mapped from the SEI will be more descriptive of the type of endpoint reference being passed.

JAX-WS implementors are expected to extract the XML infoset from an EndpointReferece using the writeTo(javax.xml.transform.Result) method.

JAXB will bind this class to xs:anyType. If a better binding is desired, web services developers should use a concrete subclass such as W3CEndpointReference.

The getPort method returns a proxy. If there are any reference parameters in the EndpointReference instance, then those reference parameters MUST appear as SOAP headers, indicating them to be reference parameters, on all messages sent to the endpoint. The parameter serviceEndpointInterface specifies the service endpoint interface that is supported by the returned proxy. The EndpointReference instance specifies the endpoint that will be invoked by the returned proxy. In the implementation of this method, the JAX-WS runtime system takes the responsibility of selecting a protocol binding (and a port) and configuring the proxy accordingly from the WSDL Metadata from this EndpointReference or from annotations on the serviceEndpointInterface. For this method to successfully return a proxy, WSDL metadata MUST be available and the EndpointReference instance MUST contain an implementation understood serviceName metadata.

Because this port is not created from a Service object, handlers will not automatically be configured, and the HandlerResolver and Executor cannot be get or set for this port. The BindingProvider().getBinding().setHandlerChain() method can be used to manually configure handlers for this port.