Discoverable Web Service (UDDI)

For Web Services to be utilized, they need to be discoverable to businesses on the Internet. Therefore, UDDI is considered an important part of the Web Services protocol stack, and thus an important aspect of the Microsoft XML Web Services offering.

What is UDDI?

UDDI, which stands for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, is a global registry managed by Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard that allows any business to discover and be discovered by other businesses from anywhere around the world so that they may conduct economic transactions more efficiently. Think of UDDI as the “yellow pages” for the Internet. In addition, UDDI not only allows for the discovery of trading partners but also describes services, whether they are Web Services or manual services.
UDDI is more than a search engine for businesses and the services they provide. Discovering potential partners is only part of the solution. More importantly, a means of communication among your many varying partners must be inherently defined in a dynamic way regardless of the platform or application they are using to conduct business. In an ideal environment, an internal business application, which will be UDDI aware, will go out on the Web, search the UDDI registry, identify and download technical specifications to allow seamless integration between the internal application and the discovered external one, and conduct automated transactions with little to no human intervention.
For example, suppose a company wanted to order auto parts electronically via the Web. An individual at that company would access an internal service to search the UDDI global registry, a Web Service in itself, for all suppliers of auto parts. Once the service has “discovered” all potential suppliers, the next objective is to identify which suppliers provide an online order entry Web Service. Finally, once multiple trading partners are identified that expose this service, it must be determined if the internal business application (electronic invoicing Web service) is compatible / interoperable with those discovered.
Work is currently underway to provide enterprises with a private implementation of UDDI Business Registries (UBR). This UDDI implementation would help a large organization register and manage its internal Web Services, an example being Enterprise Application Integration. In this implementation, the entries are for Web Services provided by departments or groups within an organization. This type of UDDI implementation is completely hidden from external users behind an enterprise’s firewall. Publish-and-find operations are completely restricted to applications within the enterprise.

Why use UDDI?
In developing a Web Service, UDDI should be used primarily to stay competitive with other companies using Web Services. Without adopting the UDDI initiative, the organization runs the risk of overlooking multiple revenue streams from acquiring new trading partners. More importantly, the business’ existing suppliers / vendors will go else where to conduct business in a more efficient / automated fashion through UDDI and Web Services. Web Services are the next logical evolutionary step in the Internet space that allows programmable elements to be called by other applications (Application-to-Application (A2A) Integration) in a distributed manner.
Without UDDI, businesses that want to conduct transactions with their trading partners (partners by choice or coerced partnerships) must either build their own proprietary software or leverage someone else’s technology, which can become very costly. As the numbers of businesses expand online, so have the numbers of proprietary software for A2A integration. This influx of in-house software has created a Web of non-standardized forms of communications that has led to a slow time to market for products and services. With the adoption of UDDI, time to market for services are reduced, and A2A integrations on independent systems lead to smoother, more efficient transactions, the way the Internet was meant to be.