Integrating a Decentralized Web Service Discovery System into the Internet Infrastructure

A weak point of web services is the lack of suitable technologies for implementing service registries. Universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI), as a centralized approach, conflicts with the distributed nature of service-oriented architectures and did not prevail in practice. Hence, in this paper we propose an architecture for discovering and locating web services using the domain name system (DNS). After a detailed survey on current technologies for finding services we present a novel service discovery scheme that is easy to implement and scalable at the same time. Each service provider runs one or more discovery proxies in its Internet domain and sets DNS records pointing to them. Then, local services can register at these proxies. Service users from the local network as well as from the Internet can now locate these proxies using the DNS and query them for available services in this domain. Thus, the local proxies are linked together by the DNS forming one coherent global service directory.