.NET & XML

Publishing a Web Service

Once you have set up your server to host a web service, you need to inform potential clients of its existence. Additionally, you might want to access a web service published by someone else. These are both jobs for UDDI.

Tip

The UDDI specifications are maintained by OASIS, and as of this writing version 3.0 is available. However, I’ll be referring to UDDI Version 2.04 in this chapter because Microsoft is currently only supporting the 1.x and 2.x releases of the specification.

The UDDI data model

The UDDI data model, described in an XML Schema, consists of five basic information elements. The following lists the elements of the UDDI document:

businessEntity

The businessEntity element represents information about an entity that has published information about its services; it need not be a business per se. A businessEntity is uniquely identified by a businessKey, which is a universally unique identifier (UUID). The businessEntity contains additional information, including the name, description, contacts, alternate discovery URLs, identifiers such as Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S® Number, and categorys such as ISO 3166 Geographic Taxonomy. The businessEntity element also contains the businessService elements. All name and description elements in the UDDI document may have an optional language specified by the xml:lang element.

businessService

The businessService element represents information about the web service published by a businessEntity. It ...