Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registries are expected to provide a path to services over the Web. But Eric Pulier, president of Digital Evolution, believes UDDI is also good for providing services within the enterprise.
Digital Evolution is a company that provides a UDDI registry inside a companys firewall for employees and anointed business partners to access and use. The UDDI registry is something like the pages of the phone book. The XML-based specification provides support for contact names and Web addresses (white pages), an industry classification (yellow pages) and types of services offered (green pages).
At some point, a series of UDDI servers are expected to exist around the Web like the current Domain Name System, which translates typed Web site names into TCP/IP addresses. By querying those servers, a Web application or other software could discover what services are available to it, what transactions they offer and what level of encryption is used.
The draft UDDI specification was published May 2, composed by Ariba, IBM and Microsoft; UDDI runs on top of Microsofts Simple Object Access Protocol. As work continued on the specification by the UDDI Community (www.uddi.org), Hewlett-Packard became a major contributor, Pulier said, and version 2 of the specification was published June 18. The UDDI Community, an industry consortium of 280 technology vendors and businesses, will eventually submit a mature specification to a standards body, such as the World Wide Web Consortium or the Internet Engineering Task Force, he said.
Digital Evolution is one of the first companies to seize the emerging UDDI standard and build a product line around it, though it is aimed inside the corporation at the IT manager rather than outside at software to software Web operations.
“We have a private UDDI registry. We seek to sell a suite of products that facilitate the use of Web services in an enterprise,” Pulier said.
The products include: Data Consumer, a browser-based data sorter that allows narrowing a data set to what the user is interested in; Margin Call, which allows a server to be set up to store frequently requested data in main memory, leading to speedier responses; Code Mason, which automatically creates copies of stored procedures and data access classes of a database system, reducing the need for programmers to recreate them manually; and Java Trap, which creates a repository of XML files containing information about the environment in which a Java application will run.
Beta versions of the service building modules are “rolling out now without any pricing,” Pulier said. The modules are scheduled for general availability in three months; the price has yet to be determined.
Digital Evolution also offers its Pacific Block Exchange as a UDDI registry-based place where third parties can offer software, provide a service and bill customers that make use of it. Pulier said software development is finally on the eve of actually being able to implement re-useable modules of code, thanks to UDDI and the standards created by the Internet.