it is sometimes beneficial to stop what youre doing, take a look around, and see where youve come from and where you are going. this regrouping is taking place right now across the software industry and is focused on the problem space of web service description, discovery, and integration. at a high level, this article briefly discusses the progress made to date at solving the problem, describes the benefits and shortcomings of current technology, and presents a vision of the possible future of web services infrastructure. at its most fundamental level, this article deals with the idea of programmatically locating a web service that satisfies a specific need and then (programmatically) integrating that service into an application.
soap 1.1 (simple object access protocol) was published as a w3c note in may 2000 and has since become an industry-standard format for enabling xml-based messaging and remote procedure calls. wsdl 1.1 (web services definition language) was published as a w3c note in march 2001 and, despite some ambiguity that has proven a significant hurdle to interoperability, has gained widespread industry support as a mechanism for describing message structure and required transport details. uddi (universal description, discovery and integration), the third member (after wsdl and soap) of the web service standards triumvirate, was first published in september 2000.
however, in contrast to its siblings uddi has not enjoyed the same level of industry acceptance. it is particularly relevant in this article because it is the industrys first attempt to solve the problem of discovery and integration of web services, in particular as discovery and integration support web service reuse and sharing. the need to reuse and share services is arguably the most compelling argument for service-oriented architectures (soas).
several factors contributed to uddis lackluster start out of the gate.
uddi was a specification that was ahead of its time. it was designed to enable management of large numbers of web services, but at the time of its release, companies tended to have relatively few web services to manage. only now, after four yea... 下一页