Service Discovery

We live in a service society and every day we are able to make use of many services because of the specialized training people have in different service areas. We need our damaged cars repaired and our hair cut, so we use the yellow pages to find feasible service providers and eventually negotiate with some of them to make a final decision of whom to use. This kind of specialized business has many advantages for consumers; the service providers are specialists, therefore they do the job faster, better, and cheaper than we could ourselves. And if not satisfied, another service provider will be chosen next time. Not surprisingly, this pattern to handle portions of work can also be found in distributed computer systems, namely “service oriented Architectures” (SOA) or “service oriented computing” (SOC). Applications are built of services, where each service fulfills a task for the application. Services are either implemented in software or act as proxies (“bridge”) to hardware, for example printers or light switches. In contrast to software components, services run on different computers and communicate over networks with their clients. AbstrAct