Flashline Inc., a supplier of reusable software components, on Monday announced the results of its recent study that shows increasing momentum in the use of Web services and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) to locate and manage Web services.
The study–based on a survey of developers, architects and IT managers across a variety of industries including financial services, retail, computers and electronics, and health care–found that 55 percent of respondents are evaluating internal or external registries and 11 percent are currently using a UDDI registry to organize and access Web services.
Flashline officials said the study sought to identify how companies are handling Web services and to evaluate whether UDDI plays a role in their Web services strategies.
Among other UDDI-specific findings in the survey, Flashline said 30 percent of the respondents are evaluating using an internal UDDI registry and 25 percent are weighing using an external UDDI registry.
Meanwhile, the company said about a third of survey respondents are currently working with Web services, and 64 percent are evaluating or will be working with Web services. Only 8 percent of respondents have no plans to use Web services, the company said.
Flashlines interest in Web services and UDDI, the open standard for organizing and registering services, stems from the companys interest in capturing a share of the market for tools and frameworks for developing Web services. Flashline claims its software reuse solution, the Flashline Component Manager, Enterprise Edition (CMEE) “bridges the gap between UDDI and practical Web services implementations,” the company said. CMEE supports almost any UDDI registry and defines and manages additional documentation required to use a Web service. In addition, documentation for a Web service-¾including descriptions, response times, APIs, reliability and usage information¾can be automatically loaded into, tracked and managed through CMEE, the company said.
The IT research firm Gartner Inc. projects that the Web services market will be valued at more than $21 billion by 2004, with UDDI serving as a catalyst.
“As Web services grow in significance in the coming months and years, it is important for companies to effectively and efficiently manage and leverage these services throughout their organizations in order to get the most value and maximize reuse,” said Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline, in a statement. “As businesses move from Web services strategy to actual implementation, the role of UDDI will increase in importance…”
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