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Subject: TN idea: link tags for UDDI
Various machine-readable links are being included in web pages (especially blogs) to enable various discovery techniques. For example, RSS Auto-discovery provides a link to an RSS file. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02/important_change_to_the_link_tag.html The addition of such link tags are very simple and provide a low barrier to entry into a more discoverable infrastructure. Many large organizations are now providing RSS feeds, and many are using the RSS auto-discovery technique referenced above. The following technique is proposed for use in an XHTML homepage to locate UDDI servers. (UDDI TN material?) A <link> element is placed within the <head> element as follows: <link rel="alternate" type="application/uddi-inq+xml" title="bizNameHere" href="url/to/SOAP/UDDIv2/inquiryAPI" /> The title attribute SHOULD contain the business name, which could be used in a UDDI find_business inquiry sent via SOAP to the href URL. Note that the type attribute contains a media type, which is currently not registered with IANA. This media type flags this link tag as one pointing to the SOAP UDDI v2 inquiry API. A web page may contain zero or more such links. For example, if the organization has published a bizEntity in both the UBR and a private UDDI registry, then two link tags would be used. Thus, agents (browsers and other web-enabled applications) that retrieve the homepage can examine the link tags to discover UDDI servers. The idea is to locate an HTTP server, for example, using DNS SRV RRs (_http._tcp.<domain>), then retrieve the XHTML home page associated with it. UDDI servers can be discovered using this technique. By providing the URL of the UDDI inquiry API, discovery software can be written to follow the pointers. This provides a way of bootstrapping web service consumers. Rather than manually configuring them with the SOAP inquiry URI, web service consumer applications would be manually configured only with, say, a tModelKey for services they need to find. Once they find UDDI servers using the technique described above, they can find_bindings with the tModelKey in the tModelBag. Note that using the link tag described above to retrieve the UDDI bizEntity for the organization is a two step process. First, do find_business with the name parameter set to the value of the title attribute (i.e., bizNameHere). Second, do get_businessDetail with the results of the first step. Both steps use SOAP (HTTP POST). A slightly different approach can be used to link directly to the associated bizEntity from the XHTML homepage using the following technique: <link rel="alternate" type="application/uddi-biz+xml" title="businessEntity" href="http-get/url/to/xml/bizEntity" /> The value of the href attribute would be the URI assigned by the UDDI server to the discoveryURL [1] with useType="businessEntity". It can be retrieved using HTTP GET. Using link tags would enable other things, such as bookmarklets [2]. For example, bookmarklets are available for Amphetadesk [3]. Perhaps tools like Amphetadesk will emerge that know how to grok the UDDI link tags to help discovery services in UDDI. [1] http://uddi.org/pubs/DataStructure-V2.03-Published-20020719.htm#_Toc25130759 [2] http://www.bookmarklets.com/ [3] http://diveintomark.org/projects/misc/autorss/amphetadesk.html Paul
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