Section 8.2. Motivation for UDDI

8.2. Motivation for UDDI

The original motivation for UDDI was to provide the specifications and a set of actual implementations of a registry of Web services and of the businesses that provide them. The specifications were intended to enable product implementations of UDDI, and the implementations were intended to provide a registry that businesses could use to advertise themselves and any services they wanted to make available to the general public. This public registry, known as the UDDI Business Registry, is a single logical registry composed of implementations of UDDI from multiple companies. A second public registry, the test registry, was made available so that developers could experiment with UDDI in advance of product implementations becoming available.

A UDDI registry provides a well-known shared registry or index where clients can search for businesses and services that they want to interact with. UDDI offers a standard way for businesses to describe themselves, including categorizing themselves in as many ways as are appropriate, such as geographic location and industry sector(s) serviced, and for potential clients to search for them based on their particular requirements.

Even within a single enterprise, it can be difficult to identify and describe existing services in a way that allows other developers to discover them, and the benefits of UDDI are applicable within an enterprise. This type of deployment of UDDI allows for much greater control over the content of the registry.

Another use of UDDI is between cooperating enterprises, in which case an enterprise might host a UDDI registry containing details of services that approved business partners provide.