Querying for services using soap over UDP

At a receiving computer system in a computerized environment in which the receiving computer receives a request form a sending computer for one or more available network resources at the receiving computer, a method of responding to the sending computer in a manner that does not necessarily incur the overhead of connection-oriented communication, comprising the acts of:

• receiving a user datagram from a sending computer system through a UDP communication protocol, the user datagram comprising a SOAP message that requests one or more available resources at the receiving computer system;
• identifying a reply address from at least a portion of the SOAP message;
• encapsulating a SOAP response message within a response user datagram;
• and
• sending the response user datagram to the identified reply address through a UDP communication protocol, wherein the response user datagram includes a SOAP message identifying one or more available resources at the receiving computer system.

At a sending computer system in a computerized environment in which one or more receiving computer systems on a network have one or more resources, a computer program product having computer-executable instructions stored thereon that, when executed, cause one or more processors to perform a method of sending a request to one or more computers for the available resources in a manner that does not necessarily incur the overhead of connection-oriented communication, comprising the following:

• identifying the presence of one or more computer systems on a network;
• encapsulating a SOAP message to be sent to the identified one or more computer systems within a user datagram, wherein the SOAP message contains a request for available resources from each of the one or more computer systems;
• and
• sending the user datagram to the identified one or more computer systems through a UDP communication protocol.