Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Andrew D Milligan

Harris Syed

Richard L Hasha

Jeffrey Bruce Parham

Gopal Krishna R Kakivaya

Max A Feingold

Saji Abraham

Charles Ronald Reeves, Jr

Charles R Reeves

Angela Mills

Lawrence A Buerk

Donald F Box

John David Doty

Lucas R Melton

A system and methods for service discovery and publication are disclosed. Application programs write requests for service discovery, publication, and subscription to a service discovery application programming interface. The service discovery application programming interface invokes one or more lower-level protocols to satisfy the discovery, publication and/or subscription request. Service information retrieved from lower-layer protocols is formatted into a consistent data model and returned to the client application. In addition, service information may be stored in a persistent data store managed by a discovery persistence service communicatively connected to the service discovery API.

Service discovery and publication

Example embodiments of the present invention provide a mechanism for allowing developers to define new interfaces and insert custom translational code that implements these new interfaces for legacy components that otherwise cannot communicate in a web service environment. These new interfaces are then exposed to the web service client in such a way that abstracts the web service client from the legacy components interfaces. The objects that implement the new interfaces are referred to herein as 'service surrogates' and the new interfaces will be commonly referred to as a, 'surrogate interfaces.' These surrogate interfaces may be initialized along with an instance of the service surrogate upon startup of an application that offers the services. In addition, a dynamic web service can simultaneously run along with the service surrogate for those services that may not need the features offered by the service surrogates.

Generating a dynamic web service and dynamic service surrogate for legacy application components

The present invention provides a mechanism that allows an administrative event to trigger or cause the generation of a dynamic web service during initialization of legacy application components. Similar to other types of static tooling approaches, the dynamic approach&#x2014;as supported herein&#x2014;uses available metadata describing an interface for communicating with legacy components. Rather than generating and manifesting the web service via tooling on a one time or occasional bases, however, example embodiments provide for the generation of the web service by the supporting infrastructure as a standard part of application initialization. Upon stopping the application, a termination sequence is provided that stops the corresponding dynamic web service and deletes the web service description used to generate the dynamic web service. Accordingly, every time the application is started the available metadata will need to be consulted and a consistent service will be built on-the-fly.

Dynamic service generation for legacy components

A system and method comprising a client-side manager component that manages access points (such as URLs) to distributed services for client applications. The client application hosts the client-side manager, and specifies criteria for a service. The manager component uses the criteria to query a service registry, such as a UDDI-based registry, and caches the returned list. To use a service, the client calls the manager component on a defined interface, and the manager component returns one of the cached access points. The cached access points may be returned based on an ordering, such as to distribute requests among services. If the service fails, the client calls a failure-related method of the manager component with failure details, and retrieves a new access point. The manager component reports the error to an error handling service, whereby the error information may be used in a quality of service statistic at the service registry.

System and method for managing access points to distributed services

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for creating proxies from service description metadata at runtime. A proxy creation request is received from a requesting application while the requesting application is executing at runtime. The proxy creation request requests creation of a proxy instance to facilitate compatible communication between the requesting application and another application. A proxy instance is created in response to the proxy creation request. Service description metadata describing the other application is accessed (e.g., through a request to a metadata service or retrieval from cache). The proxy instance is configured in accordance with the service description metadata describing the other application. Accordingly, the proxy instance can facilitate compatible communication between the requesting application and the other application to implement operations that the requesting application requests to be performed at the other application.

Creating proxies from service description metadata at runtime

A system and method for enabling UDDI client applications to interactively obtain taxonomy information from a UDDI server and thereby present that information to a user, such as to enable navigation through the taxonomy. An application programming interface is provided by which a client application sends a unique taxonomy identifier and a relationship qualifier (e.g., root, parent and/or child) to a server. The client may also identify a reference node within the taxonomy. The server receives the (e.g., XML) request message, and extracts the data to query a database based on the relationship qualifier (or qualifiers) and the taxonomy/reference node. Based on the query results, the server returns a response that provides relationship information to the client, such as information on root, parent and/or child nodes that satisfy the request. The client interprets the response to present the taxonomy, such as for user navigation through the taxonomy.

Growing community of inventors

Redmond, WA, United States of America

Andrew D Milligan