WSDL Files and the Client-Side Proxy Interface

The vSphere Web Services SDK provides a set of WSDL (Web Services Description Language) files that define the vSphere Web Services API. Web-services development tools such as JAX-WS wsimport, or Microsoft .NET wsdl.exe use these WSDL files to generate client-side proxy code (stubs).

The client proxy provides a language-specific interface proxy, for example, using Java or C#. The proxy facilitates remote method invocation, organization of object data, and other aspects of distributed, object-oriented, applications programming. Your client application calls proxy interface methods. The client proxy uses SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to exchange WSDL messages with a vSphere server.

Client-Server Communication Through a Client Proxy Interface is a representation of a client application that uses the client proxy interface to call a method. The client proxy interface is based on the WSDL definitions.

Figure 1. Client-Server Communication Through a Client Proxy Interface

To use the VMware client proxy interface, you must import the vSphere Web Services API client libraries in to your client application using the following Java and C# statements.


C#	using VimApi;
Java	import com.vmware.vim25.*;

Important: The vSphere Web Services SDK includes Java client-side proxy code that was generated using the JAX-WS toolkit. If the versions of Java and JAX-WS on your development platform are the same as those used to generate the proxy interface shipped in the SDK, you do not have to generate client-side proxy code from the WSDL. See the Developer’s Setup Guide for information about how to configure a development environment for the vSphere Web Services SDK.