using jax-ws in jboss

Question

I am trying to call a web service from java. I am using JBoss as the client application server. The Web server is written in jax-ws and is running in some other server (which i dont know).

My requirement is to call the web service from my application running in JBoss. After doing enough search, I found that, jax-ws is a Standard and now included in jdk. Metro is a reference implementation of jax-ws and is provided in the Glassfish App server.

My Question is: -
Is there any other jax-ws implementation present in the market?
Just like each container provides its own implementation of Servlet API, do all of them provide implementation of Jax-ws?
Do I need to copy the Metro api to my Jboss application?
Where does JBossWS comes into play here?
A sample code provided by the Web Service host specifies that, the client needs to have to add a authentication token to the SOAPHeader, and in the sample code they have used com.sun.xml.ws package.
When I used MessageFactory to create a new SOAPMessage, will it use the Metro RI or JbossWS?
If Metro is glassfish's implementation of Jax-ws, then will it run in other app servers?

Added to that, my application exposes another Web service also (although it uses Axis 1).

I am getting a bit confused regarding this.

Can someone help me with some details regarding jax-ws, Metro, JbossWS. And where do each of them stand.

Answer 1

JBossWS is the Web-Service stack provided by the JBoss Application Server, and yes, it is also an implementation of the JAX-WS standard. As far as I know, JBossWS is based on Apache CXF. Glassfish uses another implemetation of JAX-WS, Metro.

In order to communicate with a remote WebService (the implementation is not important, as long as it uses standards), you can simply use JAX-WS api and any Application Server which provides an implementation for it. JBoss does, so you have just to write your client following the JAX-WS api (and it should run on both JBoss and Glassfish or any other JAX-WS compliant container).

About the authentication, you should provide some more information, since there are a lot of options in the standards here.