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Publishing a Web Service

When you make your service available through a public registry, you essen 

tially open the service's accessibility to the widest possible audience. When a

service is registered in a public registry, any client, even one with no prior knowl 

edge of the service, may look up and use the service. Keep in mind that the public

registry holds the Web service description, which consists not only of the service's

WSDL description but also any XML schemas referenced by the service descrip 

tion. In short, your Web service must publish its public XML schemas and any

additional schemas defined in the context of the service. You also 

must

 publish on

the same public registry XML schemas referred to by the Web service description.

E

When a Web service is strictly for intra enterprise use, you may publish a Web 

service description on a corporate registry within the enterprise.

E

You do not need to use a registry if all the customers of your Web services are 

dedicated partners and there is an agreement among the partners on the use of 

the services. When this is the case, you can publish your Web service descrip 

tion the WSDL and referenced XML schemas at a well known location 

with the proper access protections.

3.6.2 Understanding Registry Concepts

When considering whether to publish your service via a registry, it is important to

understand some of the concepts, such as repositories and taxonomies, that are asso 

ciated with registries. 

Public registries are not repositories. Rather than containing complete details

on services, public registries contain only details about what services are available

and how to access these services. For example, a service selling adventure pack 

ages cannot register its complete catalog of products. A registry can only store the

type of service, its location, and information required to access the service. A

client interested in a service must first discover the service from the registry and

then bind with the service to obtain the service's complete catalog of products.

Once it obtains the service's catalog, the client can ascertain whether the particu 

lar service meets its needs. If not, the client must go back to the registry and repeat

the discovery and binding process the client looks in the registry for some other

service that potentially offers what it wants, binds to that service, obtains and

assesses its catalog, and so forth. Since this process, which is not insignificant,

may have to be repeated several times, it is easy to see that it is important to regis 

ter a service under its proper taxonomy.