What's the difference between jaxws-ri and jaxws-rt?

Question

See the JAX-WS Maven repository from java.net - http://download.java.net/maven/2/com/sun/xml/ws/

There are two similar folders - jaxws-rt and jaxws-ri . Currently, I'm using the jaxws-rt and it's working fine.

Here are my questions:

1. What's the difference between ri and rt ?
2. Does ri stand for reference implementation and rt stand for runtime ?

Please advice.
Thanks.

Answer 1

As an answer to your second question : Yes, you are right.

Below is the proof.

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RI stands for Reference Implementation .

Quote from the official JAX-WS project home page (an old site, see the UPDATE section below):

Welcome to the JAX-WS Reference Implementation ( RI ) Project.

Plus in the POM file for the jaxws-ri (version 2.2.8 at the time of writing) we can find the following:

<name>JAX-WS RI Standalone Zipped Bundle</name>
<description>Open source Reference Implementation of JSR-224: Java API for XML Web Services Distribution Bundle</description>

---

RT stands for Runtime .

In the POM file for the jaxws-rt (version 2.2.8 at the time of writing) we can find the following:

<name>JAX-WS RI Runtime Bundle</name>

(The word Runtime gives us a hint :-))

---

UPDATE (April 2019)

The were quite a few changes in the Java EE world recently. Java EE was moved to Eclipse Enterprise for Java ( EE4J ). Read EE4J FAQ for more information.

And JAX-WS project, which is now part of the EE4J, has also moved to another place:

• JAX-WS project's home page: https://javaee.github.io/metro-jax-ws/
• JAX-WS project's code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/metro-jax-ws

Answer 2

Looks like -ri generates the zip file for distribution (eg for use on the java.net web site), whereas -rt is for use as a Maven dependency. So you should keep using it.

EDIT : The other answer is more accurate and should be accepted