UDDI Registries Seeing Surge In Popularity

UDDI is the Web services protocol designed to help discover service assets. The issue The Hartford faced was this: Using Web services, even SOAP-based over HTTP, would require a certain amount of tight coupling, because the application needs to know exactly where the service is, and how to bind to it. So if an application starts getting an increased load, and needs to be moved to a new machine that is faster or has more memory, it is necessary to make the change in either the application or the Web services management tool. "Either way, you're back to hard coding changes," said Moreland. With a UDDI registry, however, applications can be moved without having to make those changes, as all Web services are put in one place where they can be easily looked up. "So you can move services around and the application is not affected, because it's going to the registry to find out where the services it needs reside," he said.

Prompted by today's announcement of an upgraded business services directory by Systinet, users and industry analysts say that UDDI is finally coming of age. Long lagging behind adoption of other Web services protocols such as SOAP and WSDL, UDDI had previously been the "ugly ducking" of the Web services world, according to Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with Zapthink. LLC. "People have long been wondering when use of registries and UDDI would take off, and lately we've been hearing a lot less of that kind of talk," said Schmelzer. "UDDI is finally coming into the mainstream." Companies are realizing that if they want to get reuse out of Web services, or if they want to apply policy, especially run-time policy, they need a registry to make that work, said Schmelzer.

Agreed Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at Zapthink, "UDDI registries are important during design time as developers look at how to access various services and build consumer for services," he said. Run-time use of registries is also important, when UDDI can provide for dynamic lookup of services, he said.

The Systinet product, which is an enhancement of an existing registry product, reflects the maturing of the UDDI space. The company is defining it as a "business services registry," which supports the entire business services lifecycle of an SOA, said Bloomberg. "It's not just a place to discover service assets, but also a place to define and manage policy," he said. Other Web services vendors, like Infravio are also going beyond plain UDDI to give companies the capability to build and deploy SOAs, he said.

Other types of companies that are providing capabilities of this sort based on registries, although not UDDI-based, include companies in the asset management and meta data management markets, such as Logic Library, said Schmelzer.