Software Architect's Handbook

Locating and exchanging information with another system

To achieve interoperability between two software systems, the consumer system must be able to locate the other and the two systems must be able to exchange information in a semantically meaningful way.

The consumer system may or may not need to discover the other system at runtime. If it does need to happen at runtime, a known directory service is searched by one or more attributes (for example, a URL) in order to locate the system. It should be noted that there can be n levels of indirection during the location process. For example, once one location is found, it may lead to another location, and so on, until the service is discovered.

Once the system is located, the response must be ...