This pattern is provided courtesy of a customer and upcoming partner entreprise, where it is in use in production.

Requirements :

• resolve web service URLs according to deployment environment
• easy development, easy to update when a new one rolls out

Solution :

• use a property file, one version per environment, loaded from filesystem by the SOA runtime, with properties like “[service alias]=[service URL]“
• for easier deployment, can also be loaded HTTP using a Java URL, or a mounted folder

Even easier with EasySOA :

• Use EasySOA to generate the property file : gather service URLs using service discovery (for instance Discovery By Browsing, by browsing the pages where your service stacks list the services they expose), then write a simple client (JUnit test, nodejs…) using the Remote APIs to access the service registry, get them and write them in a file. Service alias (property names) can be taken from any other service data there is (service name…).

A fews ideas for scaling it up with EasySOA :

• Define and add your own “service alias” metadata to the EasySOA service registry, and fill and manage it online.
• Also generate your property file from your development environment, and add a unit test to compare it to the one generated by EasySOA.
• Or even use a full blown Entreprise Service Bus, and adapt your unit test to compare ESB-known services to EasySOA detected ones.