4.3 How UDDI has evolved

Even by today s Internet-fueled pace, the evolution of UDDI has been relatively rapid and pronounced. There were only 22 months between UDDI V1 and V3. The overriding motivation to make UDDI a bona fide industry standard as soon as justifiably possible explains some of the haste to push out new specifications way ahead of the actual technology adoption curve. There is nothing wrong in this, and the key UDDI instigators ”namely, IBM, Microsoft, and Ariba ”need to be applauded for their commitment and drive.

When the UDDI Consortium was created in the summer of 2000 to bring forth UDDI V1, its charter was to oversee UDDI through V3. At that juncture UDDI was to be handed over to an accepted standards body. This indeed was exactly what happened , with the Consortium handing over the reins to OASIS in the summer of 2002, following the release of V3. OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is an accepted Web- and XML- related standards body. It started its life in 1993 under the name SGML Open . This was a consortium of vendors and users committed to developing guidelines for interoperability among products that support the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) ”the granddaddy of XML. OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org) adopted its current name in 1998 to reflect its expanded scope of interest, especially in the technical aspects of XML and e-business.

OASIS now bills itself as a not-for-profit, global consortium, which drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards ”UDDI now being one of these. OASIS has more than 2,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries . It also has close ties with the United Nations (UN), and together they jointly sponsor ebXML (Electronic Business using XML) ”one of the first, and as yet one of the most credible, initiatives, alongside Web services, to promulgate the use of XML by enterprise applications.

OASIS sets out to produce respected and popular worldwide standards for security, Web services, XML conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps, and interoperability within and between marketplaces . It achieves this goal by enabling its wide and well-represented membership to set the OASIS technical agenda. Cognizant of how heavy bureaucracy has successfully scuttled many standards efforts (and OSI comes to mind as a good example), OASIS favors a dynamic, lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. Given these credentials, one cannot reasonably argue that OASIS does not have the legitimacy to make UDDI a true, industry standard for the Web and e-business.

When UDDI was first conceived, realizing a UBR was the Holy Grail. UDDI V1, as characterized in Figure 4.6, focused on the needs for implementing a UBR. The initial UDDI.org Consortium, which consisted of around 30 well-known names , in addition to those of IBM and Microsoft, was indeed extremely successful in making sure that a three-node UBR was active and ready to roll when the initial V1 specification was unveiled to the world. Since then, the most profound change that has happened has been the growth in interest in private and semiprivate UDDI registries. Version 3 s main thrust has to do with multiregistry-distributed UDDI environments with root and affiliate registries.

Table 4.1 sets out to highlight the evolutionary history of UDDI.

Table 4.1: Evolutionary History of UDDI
UDDI Specification
	Version 1	Version 2	Version 3
Published:	September 2000	June 2001	July 2002
Primary themes:	Create a framework for a UBR	Support complex organization models that include business units and subdivisions Internationalization in the form of permitting businessEntity description in multiple languages Support for more taxonomies	Private and semiprivate registries User -friendly UDDI keys Operation information (i.e., subscription service for change notification) Support for digital signatures
Data structures:	1. businessEntity 2. businessService 3. bindingTemplate 4. tModel	1. businessEntity 2. businessService 3. bindingTemplate 4. tModel 5. publisherAssertion	1. businessEntity 2. businessService 3. bindingTemplate 4. tModel 5. publisherAssertion 6. Subscription
Registry keys supported:	uuidKeys	uuidKeys, domainKeys, and derived keys

The bottom line here is that the UDDI standard is now well ahead of UDDI implementations , including the UBR ”not to mention overall UDDI adoption. In reality, OASIS has time on its hands in terms of having to do much more on the standard ”though, as is today s wont when it comes to Web services “related specifications, it is unlikely to be too long before we see UDDI V4. However, what is important right now is to ensure that UDDI and Web services become valuable business assets, rather than being technologically impressive paper tigers .