terminology - What is a web service endpoint?

Question

Let's say my web service is located at http://localhost:8080/foo/mywebservice and my WSDL is at http://localhost:8080/foo/mywebservice?wsdl.

Is http://localhost:8080/foo/mywebservice an endpoint, i.e., is it the same as the URI of my web service or where the SOAP messages received and unmarshalled?

Could you please explain to me what it is and what the purpose of it is?

Answer 1

This is a shorter and hopefully clearer answer... Yes, the endpoint is the URL where your service can be accessed by a client application. The same web service can have multiple endpoints, for example in order to make it available using different protocols.