Patent ID: 7296022

Claim:
A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for a client on a computer network to use a Web service to access, via a server, a database directory for discovering other Web services accessible on the network, the computer-readable medium comprising computer-executable instructions for: receiving a description document from the server for describing a Web service which interacts with the server to discover other Web services listed in a database directory of Web services, the description document having: class definitions for a generic object class; a plurality of object type classes derived from the generic object class, wherein each of the plurality of object type classes corresponds to a type of object in the database directory of Web services; a Web service class that includes a plurality of database operation methods defined within the Web service class, the plurality of database operation methods being defined for operating on instances of database objects within the database directory of Web services, wherein each of the plurality of database operation methods is defined for the generic object class, and wherein the Web service class is derived from a parent class; and at least one flag statement identifying an object type; in response to receiving the description document, the client converting the description document from a schema-based language for describing Web services into an intermediate language for a runtime environment; and generating a database access request message for performing a database operation on a selected object type in the database directory of Web services, including: determining whether the selected object type is the object type identified by the flag statement; if the selected object type is the object type identified by the flag statement, creating an object of the selected object type using the class definition for the selected object type in the received description document and generating a database operation method for the selected object type, the database operation method for the selected object type being based on one of the database operation methods defined for the generic object class; and serializing the created object of the selected object type and including the serialized object in the request message.