This documentation is for WSO2 ESB version 4.5.1. View documentation for the latest release.

WS-Discovery

Web Services Dynamic Discovery protocol (WS-Discovery) is a standard mechanism for locating services and service endpoints in a SOA. The simplest and most common scenario for WS-Discovery is a Web Services client searching for one or more target services. The protocol specification outlines two modes of operation for WS-Discovery.

  • Ad-hoc mode - Uses UDP multicast to advertise and discover services.
  • Managed mode - Uses HTTP unicast to advertise and discover services.

WSO2 Carbon provides a complete implementation of the WS-Discovery managed mode. With WS-Discovery components for WSO2 Carbon, any Carbon server can act as a WS-Discovery client, a WS-Discovery proxy or a WS-Discovery target service. Discovered services and related metadata are stored in a governance registry using governance interface of WSO2 Carbon. Therefore such information is also accessible via the service governance UI of Carbon as well.

The WS-Discovery Control Panel for Carbon can be used to command and control the client side aspects of WS-Discovery. It can be used to connect to remote WS-Discovery proxies and probe them for any services and service endpoints which have been already discovered. The control panel also enables you to easily convert a discovered endpoint into an address endpoint configuration which can be processed by endpoint and mediation components of WSO2 Carbon. With this feature in place, one can easily construct mediation sequences and proxy services using the endpoints discovered through WS-Discovery.

WS-Discovery allows add, edit and delete a discovery proxy and browse discovered services.