A gateway service provides the configuration of the web service enablement of a service destination, along with the information that maps to one or more target destinations.
When you create a gateway service, you map an
existing destination that hosts a target service (either an internal
service or an external Web service) to a new Web service that seems to
be provided by the gateway. This approach provides the following benefits:
- The gateway service is made available at a different Web address to the
target service, so you can replace or relocate the target service without
changing the details for the associated gateway service.
- You can have more than one target service (that is, more than one implementation
of the same logical service) for each gateway service.
- The gateway service can be made available on a different service integration
bus to the target service.
- The gateway provides a common interface to the services in each set. Your gateway service users need
not know where each underlying service is located, or whether the underlying service is being
provided internally or sourced externally, or whether there are multiple target services available for a single gateway service.