UDDI Advances to Standards Body

The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) spec was turned over to Oasis, a standards body that governs e-business and Web services standards, including XML.

The move coincides with the release of UDDI version 3, which adds support for XML-based security and policy management, internationalization and a subscription API that generates messages when changes are made to a UDDI repository. UDDI 3 also simplifies the discovery of components of other Web services standards such as WSDL.

"UDDI is really a registry of Web services, wherever they're deployed, and descriptions of how to interact with them," says Chris Kurt, program manager for UDDI.org at Microsoft and a member of Microsoft's XML standards team.

UDDI also specifies a set of APIs to interact with the registry and provides references on how to interface with applications.

While initially touted as a means to publish Web services for B2B applications in a public registry, most customers are looking at creating private UDDI repositories.

IBM already offers a UDDI registry. Microsoft will offer UDDI support in its forthcoming Windows.Net Server offering and in SQL Server and Novell recently announced its eDirectory software will support UDDI by year's end, though none of the vendors said when their UDDI products will implement the features added to the updated spec.

A complete list of features is available at Oasis' Web site.