Get Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing)

Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification that aids interoperability between web services by defining a standard way to address web services and provide addressing information in messages.

Web services are also often associated with SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). To break that down, a web service comprises these essential functions: Available over the internet or intranet networks.

There are currently two version of WS-Addressing: WS-Addressing August 2004 and WS-Addressing 1.0.

Web services allow different organizations or applications from multiple sources to communicate without the need to share sensitive data or IT infrastructure. Instead, all information is shared through a programmatic interface across a network.

Using WS-Addressing, endpoints are uniquely and unambiguously defined in the SOAP header. WS-Addressing provides two key components that enable transport-neutral addressing, including: Endpoint reference (EPR)—Communicates the information required to address a Web service endpoint.

WSDL is thus used to describe what a web service can do, where it resides and how to invoke it. While the claim of SOAP and HTTP independence is made in various specifications, WSDL is most widely used with SOAP, HTTP and MIME as the remote object invocation specification.

Description. WS-Addressing is a standardized way of including message routing data within SOAP headers. Instead of relying on network-level transport to convey routing information, a message utilizing WS-Addressing may contain its own dispatch metadata in a standardized SOAP header.

Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) defines two interoperable constructs that convey information that is typically provided by transport protocols and messaging systems. These constructs normalize this underlying information into a uniform format that can be processed independently of transport or application.