WS-Discovery at OASIS

WS-Discovery is one of those few WS-* protocols that fills a very special gap in today's distributed programming scenarios. WS-Discovery proposes a lightweight, non-centralized mechanism for dynamically discovering services in a distributed environment. Its applicability is especially important on sensors and devices networks where nodes change location constantly.  Typically, WS-Discovery is used in combination with UDP in order to broadcast discovery messages to different nodes.

In recent days, OASIS formed a new committee for defining a subset of the WS-Discovery set of specifications that can be applied on control devices.  I am more and more skeptical about the work on WS Standards lately, but I think this committee can have a positive impact in the adoptions of WS-Discovery.