“One of the key aspects of the SOA is the dynamic discovery and location independence of the services,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink. What Bloomberg means is that a Web service consumer — which is a piece of software that is looking for a Web service — shouldn’t have to know ahead of time where a particular service is located. Otherwise, if the service is moved or changes, it breaks and we’re right back to point-to-point integration.

In order to provide that capability you need to have a registry solution as part of the architecture. “It’s sort of behind the scenes and not necessarily something that users in a company would know about,” Bloomberg says. “It should be something where the software would automatically know how to look up the services it needs instead of assuming it knows where they are.”

Web service directories may not make sense for a company exposing two or three integration points, but Bloomberg pointed us to high-tech partner integration hub E2open as one hot fishing hole where Web services and the use of UDDI actually turn into B2B process management.

Read more at: Line56