Internal UDDI Web Sites

A UDDI Case Study

The examples so far in this chapter have been small in scope and they have not really represented the scenario UDDI was created to solve. UDDI’s intent is to bring companies who want to do business over the Internet together quicker and in an automatic way.

Imagine that you want to set up a Web site to provide your users with meteorological information. Your first step is to identify the information you wish to provide and how you wish to present it. For example, you may wish to provide the temperature, forecast, and barometric pressure based on zip code. For the forecasts, you may want to provide moving images from satellites as a way to enhance your site.

Now that you’ve considered the information you want to provide, you need to determine how you want to display the information. In this case, you decide to provide your meteorological information in the form of Web Services, and then you create Web pages that call the services. By providing Web Services, you gain greater flexibility because Web pages (which may not even be on your Web site), wireless devices, and applications can consume the service. UDDI helps by providing a standard means of promoting your services.

Some of the information you provide comes from the home-built weather station in your back yard. The satellite imagery needs to come from another source; by doing a search on a UDDI site you find a Web Service for these images. The UDDI site provides information on where the URL that has the service resides, as well as any contact information needed in case the service requires a fee.

Once you complete your site with the Web Services, you can go back to the UDDI registry and create an entry. Currently, using the UDDI repository for promoting services you create is free, but as the repositories grow and cost more money to maintain this could change. Figure 5.8 illustrates how you can use a UDDI repository to search for the services needed and then use it to promote the resulting site.

Figure 5.8: Illustrates how you can use a UDDI site to find the Web Services you need and then use the UDDI site to promote the resulting services.

Another aspect to consider is that the Web Service you search for may charge you money each time you use them, so you would want to pass these charges onto your customers. In the case of meteorological services, government agencies often have services available (although not always Web Services) to gather this information for free.