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Subject: service discovery, finding an object's registry with only an ID...


With ebR being the backbone for our version of what Service Oriented Architecture is, it will become increasingly important to make resolution of registry services something that can be done with absolutely no initial software configuration.

Many years ago, the internet community realized that /etc/hosts or lmhosts files would not be a scalable way of aliasing services and making applications impervious to hardware change and movement. DNS was born as a result of that. Now, I cannot imaging the internet without DNS.

Fairly recently, some people at Apple Computer published an Internet Draft, titled "DNS-Based Service Discovery" (DNS-SD). Its goal is to define an interoperable way to find out about things in the application layer from DNS. DNS-SD words with standard unicast DNS, so that means the well established, tested and deployed DNS resolver libraries on every platform can be leveraged for service discovery. DNS-SD relies on SRV and TXT records. To find registry services in a given domain, a query against SRV records may be made. Extended info about how to build a registry URL would be embedded into a TXT record.

Sample Session

Step 1:
SRV query -> _ebr._tcp.adobe.com
Response: 0..n PTR records

Step 2:
Given returned PTR records, select one. Not sure if there should be a selection criteria.

Step 3:
Interrogate TXT record from selected PTR to obtain HTTP-binding info. TXT record may contain stuff like:
Hostname=foo.adobe.com, Port=9080, HBindPrefix=/ebxml-registry/http-binding

Step 4:
Do something against the registry.

The session above illustrates more of an 'intra/extranet' model of finding a certain type of service. It would be possible to use a central DNS service to allow applications to resolve UUID/IDs into fully qualified URIs, e.g.

urn:dnssd:oasis:ADBE:6677-999-888j-jhhh

The reason for sending this message to this list is to solicit interest in this concept. If others are interested, I would like to prepare some sort of proposal for the 3.0 timeframe.

Comments?


___________________________
Matthew MacKenzie
Senior Architect
IDBU Server Solutions
Adobe Systems Canada Inc.
http://www.adobe.com/products/server/
mattm@adobe.com
+1 (506) 871.5409


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