Currently we have a sittuation where the WS meta data is obtained from a plethora of sources and all/most of those are accessed direectly throughout the jbossws codebase.

These meta data sources are:

• webservices.xml
• wsdl
• jaxrpc-maping.xml
• service endpoint interface
• ejb-jar.xml / web.xml
• jboss.xml / jboss-web.xml

The sittuation is getting worse with support of JSR-181 annotations on the endpoint implementation or the SEI.

Also, it is not clear at what point of the deployment process the meta data model should be constructed. Currently the contract between the various meta data sources and possible future ones (that may overwrite each other) is not clear definied.

I plan to refactor the WS meta data model to a single common view that is populated from interceptor(s) on the various endpoint deployers.

The ultimate client/server side service description (i.e ServiceDesc, OperationDesc, ParameterDesc) should be untouched in this refactoring process and should be populated from the new unified meta data model.