UDDI: Is It Still Relevant?

By Luc Clément

February 7, 2005

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UDDI is probably the least understood specification in the service oriented architecture (SOA) world. Analysts at ZapThink describe UDDI as the "red-headed stepchild" of web services standards, and yet they also maintain that an SOA is impossible without it. Why is UDDI so misunderstood, and yet so essential? What role does a standards-based business service registry play in the SOA world?

The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) protocol defines the standard for publishing and discovering the web services and the artifacts that make up an SOA. Put simply, UDDI is the standard interoperability protocol for a business service registry. However, UDDI may be misunderstood because a standards-based registry is not initially required for very simple, point-to-point web services projects. These kinds of initiatives typically have only a handful of web services that are created to provide a uniform, platform-neutral interface to heterogeneous IT systems, and thus solve otherwise complex application interoperability challenges. Web services work well in these simple scenarios, but this success doesn't scale as more and more web services are deployed in the enterprise.

Once web services show success and begin proliferating, the need quickly arises for a way to publish and discover services across the enterprise. In order to reuse these services, a standards-based, location-independent registry becomes essential. The registry is the nexus for all the components that comprise the SOA: individual services, web services management, security, and so on. A registry also provides the means of controlling an SOA by supporting governance and service lifecycle management.

UDDI is also a highly flexible data model and a mechanism for publishing a wide variety of information about services, service providers, service instances and their interfaces. This is a key factor to a successful deployment. Just having system-level service descriptions and connection information does not provide a consumer with enough information to use a service or reuse an interface definition effectively.

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