UDDI

UDDI
Universal Discovery Description and Integration (UDDI) is a protocol standard for Web Services repository. Specifically UDDI allows for storage and searching of web service WSDL files and associated information, like web service descriptions, provider information, and categories. Currently UDDI V3 is in beta implementation at the IBM, Microsoft, and SAP sites listed below. You can register and search for Web Services at these sites. The standard describes Web Services for publishing and searching for Web Services.

Support
Microsoft provides UDDI support in Visual Studio and Office for locating and consuming web services, addition to an SDK to publish and search. Also, UDDI services are delivered with Windows 2003 Server.

Also, there is a java UDDI server available on sourceforge and there are java APIs for accessing UDDI, including uddi4j and JAXR. However, using the Web Services described at the sites below is most likely a preferred method to search a UDDI registry.

UBR
Universal Business Registry (UBR) is a specific implementation of the UDDI V2 standard for search for businesses and business web services.

What this means to the enterprise
When an enterprise supports SOAP Web Services for data access, form definitions, and db actions, these Web Services could be published in a local directory at a clients sight. A design tool could search UDDI like the way it searches for web pages today through a search engine. These local UDDI searches could be combined with searches to multiple local servers and Internet based UDDI servers. Since Web Services are the end result of any UDDI search, this would be most appropriate for a developer in a forms designer scenario.

References

• http://www.uddi.org/
• http://uddi.microsoft.com/
• http://uddi.ibm.com/
• http://uddi.sap.com/
• http://soapuddi.sourceforge.net/