A key feature of the web services model is the ability to make web services widely available and discoverable. UDDI is one approach to publishing and discovery of web services that centralizes information about businesses and their services in registries. Another emerging alternative standard is the Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL) specification.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control can register web services that are published in WSIL documents and UDDI v3 registries. Any service that is available in a WSIL document or a UDDI v3 registry can be registered within Enterprise Manager.
You can also register meta information, or a profile, for sources of services to help you manage your registered services within Enterprise Manager. Once you register a source and assign it a logical name, you do not need to specify connectivity information, such as a URL for a WSDL, in the future. A domain can have multiple registered sources, and each registered source can have multiple registered services. Once you register a source, you can easily look up services that you can register to the source.
Service names and corresponding WSDLs must be unique within a registered single source. Once you have registered a service, an attempt to register another service with the same name, or a different name but the same WSDL URL as another service, is not valid.
Once you register a web service, you can later, more conveniently, reference the service from a selection list within Enterprise Manager. For example, when testing a web service as described in Testing Web Services, instead of specifying a WSDL, you can click the Search icon and then select the WSDL from the list of registered services.
This section includes the following topics:
Universal Description Discovery & Integration (UDDI) is an industry initiative that aims to enable businesses to quickly, easily, and dynamically find and carry out transactions with one another. A populated UDDI registry contains cataloged information about businesses; the services that they offer; and communication standards and interfaces they use to conduct transactions.
The owners of web services publish them to the UDDI registry. Once published, the UDDI registry maintains pointers to the web service description and to the service. The UDDI allows clients to search this registry, find the intended service, and retrieve its details. These details include the service invocation point as well as other information to help identify the service and its functionality.
WSIL defines an Extensible Markup Language (XML) format for referencing web service descriptions. These references are contained in a WSIL document, and refer to web service descriptions (for example, WSDL files) and to other aggregations of web services (for example, another WSIL document or a UDDI registry).
WSIL documents are typically distributed by the web service provider. These documents describe how to inspect the provider's web site for available web services. Therefore, the WSIL standard also defines rules for how WSIL documents should be made available to consumers of web services.
The WSIL model decentralizes web service discovery. In contrast to UDDI registries, which centralize information on multiple business entities and services, WSIL makes it possible to provide web service description information from any location. Unlike UDDI, WSIL is not concerned about business entity information, and does not require a specific service description format. It assumes that you know who the service provider is and relies on other standards for web service description, such as WSDL.
Follow the steps in this section to view and edit a registered source and web service.
You can register web service sources of the following types:
UDDI v3 registry import
WSIL import from URL
WSIL import from file
To register a source:
Follow the steps in this section to register web services from a registered UDDI source.
Follow the steps in this section to register web services from a registered WSIL source.