Working with Proxy Services

A proxy service is a virtual service that receives messages and optionally processes them before forwarding them to a service at a given endpoint. The proxy service allows you to perform necessary transformations and introduce additional functionality without changing your actual service. For example, if you have an unsecured service, you can secure it through the proxy service by enabling WS-Security. Also, if you want your service to handle messages of different formats, you can create a Transformer proxy service, which will transform requests and responses based on specified XSLT configurations. A proxy service can also switch transports, process the messages with mediation sequences or tasks. It can terminate the flow or send a message back to the client even without sending it to the actual service.

A proxy service is created and exposed on the specified transports through the underlying Axis2 engine. The proxy service can be a SOAP or REST/POX service over HTTP/S or SOAP, POX, Plain Text, or a Binary/Legacy service for other transports such as JMS and VFS file systems. It exposes service endpoint references (EPRs) as per the standard Axis2 conventions based on the service name.

See the following topics for instructions on how to use proxy services:

• Creating a Proxy Service
• Using REST with a Proxy Service
• Applying Security to a Proxy Service
• Publishing a Custom WSDL
• Changing the Endpoint of a Deployed Proxy Service
• Enabling Logs for Services
• Using Pinned Servers

What's next?

For additional samples of manual proxy service configurations, see Proxy Service Samples.

• Using JMS with the ESB
• Using VFS for file processing in the ESB