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Connecting the SOA dots with UDDI

When BEA's "AquaLogic" hits the market, one of its most interesting features will be a service registry that employs the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard. (Details on the service registry can be found here.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer

When BEA's "AquaLogic" hits the market, one of its most interesting features will be a service registry that employs the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard. (Details on the service registry can be found here.)  BEA announced it will be reselling the Systinet Registry as this component of AquaLogic.

According to BEA, the platform provides the industry’s first "UDDI-level replication, enabling support for federated registries," the industry’s "strongest security support, controlling access to and integrity of registry data," and, support for the UDDI V3 standard, including support for subscriptions and automatic notifications of changes to Web services.

According to research from Webservices.Org, 22% of organizations use UDDI-based registries in some form or other.  Close to half of advanced SOA or pre-SOA sites now take advantage of UDDI.

Why is having a UDDI registry important?

A few months back, I had the opportunity to chat with Luc Clement, co-chair of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee, and senior program manager at Systinet. He made the case for UDDI very clearly and succinctly: "Half the battle in deploying SOA is helping business analysts or line-of-business managers understand what services are already available that can be reused," he said. "There are also benefits to system architects and developers trying to understand what components are available for reuse. A registry provides visibility of an enterprise's SOA assets; visibility of the components that make up the service, the schemas, WSDLs and various other artifacts associated with the services."

If you're still in the process of building your first few Web services, you may not need this capability yet. But as you roll out a large number of services, and start moving toward a service-oriented architecture, you need to start thinking about a registry. UDDI is a standardized registry format that is ready to be plugged into most budding SOAs.

The OASIS international standards consortium announced approval of UDDI version 3.0.2 as an OASIS Standard in February of this year. OASIS calls UDDI "a cornerstone of Web services,defining a standard method for publishing and discovering network-basedsoftware components in a service-oriented architecture (SOA)." For more details, check out the OASIS announcement here.

 

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