In my view what makes sense and what doesn't in the world of JAX-RPC/WS, we shouldn't look at www3c specifications, but rather at Web Services Interoperability Organization's Basic Profile 1.0/1.1. This is the only standard that have been proven in production and is explicitly required by the J2EE Web Services platform. Hey, lots of stuff which is allowed in www3c specs is actually either not implemented or bluntly prohibited by WSI Basic Profile. For instance, although SOAP supports four modes of messaging (RPC/Literal, Document/ Literal, RPC/Encoded, and Document/Encoded) the BP permits the use of RPC/ Literal or Document/Literal only. Although SOAP is protocol agnostic, Basic Profile permits only HTTP and so on and so on. All these restrictions are in the name of interoperability between different platforms some of which are not object-oriented. To my knowledge, for instance, the Basic Profile prohibits operation overloading. Every operation defined by a particular portType must have a unique name. That said, it's perfectly acceptable for two or more portType elements to declare operation elements with the same name, because each portType is considered a separate definition. So, we'd better check Basic Profile regulations on this inheritance issue. But, like I said, I see the reason why this might not work - again interoperability. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3961427#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...