The Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) specification defines an endpoint reference that is represented in Extensible Markup Language (XML) by an EndpointReferenceType object that encapsulates information about the endpoint address as well as additional contextual information associated with the endpoint. Some services might be addressable using a simple URI address, as is most typical in Web services. Other services might require the use of an endpoint reference to address them, so that the additional contextual information associated with the endpoint is present in messages sent to the endpoint.
Examples of services that use WS-Addressing endpoint references include Web Services Resources and Web Services Notification message producers and message consumers, all of which have the notion of stateful resources associated with their endpoints. In these cases the endpoint reference not only contains the service address but also some data that is used to select the specific stateful resource instance for use in the processing of a Web services message.
<wsa:EndpointReference> <wsa:Address> http://www.example.com/service </wsa:Address> <wsa:ReferenceParameters> <tns:SomeDisambiguatorElement>C</tns:SomeDisambiguatorElement> </wsa:ReferenceParameters> ... </wsa:EndpointReference>
The WS-Addressing API provides the appropriate interfaces for implementing the previous pattern.