OASIS Ratifies UDDI 2 as Open Standard

As an OASIS open standard, UDDI Version 2 enjoys the highest level of support as a standard for use in Web services systems. UDDI enables users to publish, find and use Web services.

Members of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee include Computer Associates International Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., IBM, IONA Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp., Novell Inc., OpenNetwork Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp., SAP AG, SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Tata Consultancy Services.

"UDDI Version 2 is very timely, in light of enterprise adoption of the registry," said Charlie Ungashick, director of product management at Systinet Corp., of Cambridge, Mass. "Systinet has already implemented the V2 specification and has advanced V3 functionality as well. As Web services begin to proliferate in the enterprise, the need for a secure UDDI registry becomes readily apparent. It helps developers and project management advertise their Web services, which promotes reuse, but it also gives management the ability to manage and control the groundswell deployment of Web services."

In a statement, Luc Clement, UDDI program manager at Microsoft and co-chair of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee, said, "UDDIs ratification as an OASIS Open Standard indicates our success in establishing an interoperable, cross-industry standard that provides a cornerstone for the Web services architecture."

Tom Bellwood, a senior technical staff member in the emerging technologies group at IBM and co-chair of the OASIS UDDI committee, said UDDI Version 2 "provides powerful features like business relationships and external taxonomy validation. As OASIS now continues moving Version 3 toward a standard, with its support of multiregistry environments and digital signature features, we expect the use of UDDI in all environments to expand even further."

UDDI.org and OASIS are working on version 3 of UDDI. That version will enable users to build UDDI registries for different purposes in different environments. It will also feature enhancements in security and internationalization, including support for XML-based digital signatures.

"The ratification of UDDI by OASIS is a big thing for the organization as it allows them to focus on the next and probably most significant version of UDDI," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge-based market research company.

However, "the challenge that OASIS will face is that companies are still struggling with trying to understand how UDDI, and indeed the discovery aspect in general, fits into the Web services picture," he said. "Many companies currently are using Web services in a point-to-point fashion, and as such, UDDI is a bit of the redheaded stepchild of the three core Web services specs. However, as companies realize that there is significant economic and business agility benefits in moving to a service-oriented architecture [SOA], they will realize that UDDI is no longer an option, but a necessity. As such, UDDI will assume its rightful place as an equal player with SOAP and WSDL."

Yet, to get there, "companies will need to make an investment in architecture and the fundamental tenets of Web services-based SOAs: loose coupling, asynchrony and coarse granularity," Schmelzer said. "In addition, UDDI will have to significantly be improved to handle those aspects of SOAs. We are looking forward to v3.0 as being the version that can authoritatively handle those SOA requirements."

OASIS portfolio of Web services standards includes UDDI, as well as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM), WS-Security, Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM), ebXML and Universal Business Language (UBL), officials of the standards body said.

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