Service locator as the service?

[Pavan Tummala]

I have 2 services (session beans) which will be exposed as webservice for a webmethods client.
How do I go about exposing these 2 beans as a service. Can I expose the servicelocator itself as a webservice? I know the 2 session beans can be individually exposed as services, but how about servicelocator?
Any example would be great.
Thanks,

[Mark Spritzler]

Well with webservices it depends on the message, are they the same? The sender to the web service might not have your Service Locator, or even be written in Java. You expose your webservice with a URL and SOAP and XML Schema definitions. The web service should just wrap around your EJB.

Mark

[Thomas Taeger]

Originally posted by Pavan Tummala:
Can I expose the servicelocator itself as a webservice?

Hi Pavan,

the service locator is the client-side common code to [mostly remotely] locate/lookup an EJB via JNDI, a webservice or whatever service.

The service locator can not and needs not lookup itself remotely - it knows itself already - locally!
Therefore there is no use to expose the service locator as a webservice.

You may locate
- a webservice URI via a JNDI provider or
- a JNDI provider URI via a webservice,
but these seem to be usefull only if you whish to provide both kinds of protocolls via one first contact point.

Probabely you just need to concentrate on writing one client-side servicelocator only, in your case the one for the webservice.

The use of a ServiceLocator is
- to encapsulate this uggly locater-implementation in one common client-side object and
- to allow for optimizations like caching handles.

Good luck,
Thomas Taeger