Introduction

A factory service is a secure, stateless persistent service that knows how to create an instance of a transient, possibly stateful service. Clients contact the factory service and provide the needed parameters to instantiate the application instance. It is the job of the service to invoke a single instance of the application and return the WSDL document that clients can use to access the application.

Use-case scenario

1. The user contacts the factory service through a secure web portal or a direct secure connection from a factory service client. In any case, the factory service must be able to authenticate the identity of the user.
   
   
2. Once the identity of the user has been established the factory service must verify that the user is authorized to use the service.
   
   
3. When the authorization check is successful, the factory service allows the user to communicate any basic configuration requirements back to the factory service.
   
   
4. The factory then launches the application for the user either as itself or as the user using the user's proxy.
   
   
5. WSDL describing the application is generated and returned to the client and/or registered with some registry service.
   
   
6. The interested client can parse the WSDL and contact the application.