Chapter 4. UDDI-Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration

Chapter 4. UDDI Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration

When UDDI came on the scene, its champions positioned the new technology as the savior of e-business. Businesses along a value chain would use UDDI registries to dynamically and automatically select new business partners, locate the electronic services implemented by those partners and start executing e-commerce transactions with them. This would revolutionize how businesses operate: wipe out the need for human interaction in many business tasks, reduce overheads and middleman costs, and fundamentally enable a dynamic and fluid e-business environment.

Today, it is difficult to find companies that are truly using UDDI, and UDDI registries boast a relatively small number of entries. Does this mean that UDDI is DOA (dead on arrival)? By just looking at the list of some of the companies that are backing the UDDI project, one would conclude probably not.

So, how will UDDI pan out? What will enterprises do with UDDI? What do enterprise architects have to know about UDDI? In this chapter, we delve into these issues and take a practical approach to UDDI and its fit within the enterprise Web services picture. We look at the latest release of the UDDI specification Version 3 and take a closer look at some of the key architectural changes.