Tooling

There are two types of tools that help in keeping track of the services that are provided and used in your organization: a registry and a repository. The registry lists the services and its features and has an interface to search for services and to add information about services. A repository holds the actual service artifacts, such as WSDLs, policies, XSDs, and so on. It's like a library, the registry is the catalog that lists all the books and other things you can borrow. You can search it, find information about the books and CDs and add items to it. The repository is the shelves where the books and CDs are stored.

There are two use cases for searching in a registry: runtime discovery of services and design time discovery of services. Runtime discovery of services means that a service consumer looks for a service, based on certain metadata. The registry returns a number of potential candidates. The consumer inspects the web service description and then binds to the service...