Patent ID: 7580989

Claim:
In a computing environment, a method comprising: requesting access points for accessing distributed services that match specified criteria, the access points being requested from a service registry; in response to the request; receiving a plurality of access points to a plurality of distributed services, each of the plurality of distributed services matching the specified criteria, the access points being received from the service registry; maintaining the plurality of access points in a cache, wherein the plurality of access points are maintained in an ordering; receiving a request from a program to provide an access point; in response to the request, selecting a first access point from the cache based on the ordering and returning data of the first access point to the program, the first access point for accessing a first distributed service; wherein the program uses the data from the first access point to access the first distributed service; and receiving information from the program that the first distributed service which is accessed using the first access point has failed; based on the received information that the first distributed service which is accessed using the first access point has failed: selecting a second access point from the cache, the second access point for accessing a second distributed service, returning data of the second access point to the program, and marking the data from the first access point which is used to access the failed distributed service such that the first access point is not subsequently selected from the cache; wherein the data from the first access point and the data of the second access point comprises a network address of a computer system, wherein the network address can be resolved by some mechanism to an application or a particular instance of an application.