Proposal for supporting WS-MetadataExchange on Axis2
Metadata Exchange is an implementation to support WS-MetadataExchange specification published by IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. The specification essentially allows for a service requester to issue a standardized request message that ask for some or all of the metadata documents such as WSDL, XSD schema, policy associated with a Web service. The request to issue is a Get Metadata request message. This kicks off a standardized request and response MEP resulting in the delivery of a Get Metadata Response message.
To support incoming Get Metadata request message from SOAP protocol engines, Axis2 SOAP processing is extended with new metadataExchange module, and allows plug-in of Data Locators. Data Locator is responsible to perform data retrieval. The plug-in support allows other Web Services engines that build on top of Axis2 to support different data retrieval implementation.
For details implementation for Metadata Exchange support on Axis2, please refer to the documents below: