Contemporary SOA promotes discovery

Contemporary SOA promotes discovery


Even though the first generation of Web services standards included UDDI, few of the earlyimplementations actually used service registries as part of their environments. This may have to do with the fact that not enough Web services were actually built to warrant a registry. However, another likely reason is that the concept of service discovery was simply not designed into the architecture. When utilized within traditional distributed architectures, Web services were more often employed to facilitate point-to-point solutions. Therefore, discovery was not a common concern.

SOA supports and encourages the advertisement and discovery of services throughout the enterprise and beyond. A serious SOA will likely rely on some form of service registry or directory to manage service descriptions (Figure 3.7).
Figure 3.7. Registries enable a mechanism for the discovery of services.