Technobabble

Here are the steps to return a tree of objects via a JAX-WS service: Define the Node class with the necessary JAXB annotations: import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElementRef; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement; @XmlRootElement public class Node { ... private List<Node> children; ... @XmlElementRef(type = Node.class) public List<Node> getChildren() { return children; } ... } Define the JAX-WS service method: @WebMethod public Node getTree() { ... } Deploy the service. Use your IDE to generate the client proxy from WSDL. The client Node type will have: public List<Node> getNode() The accessor name changes as a result of the @XmlElementRef annotation.