Java 6 shipped with JAX-WS 2.0. Java 5 didn't ship with JAX-WS as far as I know.
I was able to use JAX-WS 2.2.5 with Java 1.6 for creating Webservice client stubs by using the Java Endorsed Override Mechansim which lists JAX-WS as one of the components which can be replaced in Java 6.
All I had to do was create a lib\endorsed directory in my JDK & JRE 6 paths & then copy jaxb-api.jar & jaxws-api.jar from JAX-WS 2.2.5 into the directory named endorsed. And both JDK & JRE 6 picked up the 2.2.5 JAX-WS automatically.
I could not find similar Java Endorsed Override Mechanism in the Java 5 documents. How I found one here. This doesn't explicty mention JAX-WS like the Java 6 documents, but it also mentions the endorsed dirs.
I created a similar 'endorsed' directory in both the JDK & JRE lib directory. I copied all the jars from JAX-WS 2.2.5 (a total of 23 jars) into the endorsed directory. However, unlike Java 6, neither javac.exe nor java.exe picked this up directly. I had to run both java.exe and javac.exe with this command line argument
-Djava.endorsed.dirs=<JDK/JRE1.5_DIR>\lib\endorsed
Everything seems to work fine, but I am wondering if this is guaranteed to work - any problems anyone has faced before? Does JAX-WS 2.2.5 support Java 5?