Hi!
I also used Ivan's notes and found that it simply would not work without the sun-jaxws.xml deployment descriptor.
This file is Metro's (the web service stack) own deployment descriptor, as can be read on this page:
https://metro.dev.java.net/guide/Deploying_Metro_endpoint.html
After having read this quote, I get the feeling it may be some kind of remains from the JAX-RPC days:
The JAX-WS stack expects the sun-jaxws.xml file rather than the jaxrpc-ri.xml file. Most of the contents in the new xml file is same as that of the older file. There is no need or equivalent to wsdeploy. So if you have used wsdeploy , it would generate the jaxrpc-ri-runtime.xml, use this file as it would have most of the information to populate the sun-jaxws.xml
A guess is that this deployment descriptor came into being before JSR109 was final, but this is just a wild guess.
Apart from this, I haven't come up with anything better. Digging around in the Metro code would help, but I am too lazy. :-)
Best wishes!