The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification defines a way to publish and discover information about Web services. The term 'Web service' describes specific business functionality exposed by a company, usually through an Internet connection, to allow another company, or its subsidiaries, or software program to use the service. You can find the UDDI specification on the OASIS UDDI Web page.
The UDDI specifications define a standard for the visibility, reusability and manageability essential for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) registry service.
IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry
The IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry is a directory for Web services that is implemented using the UDDI specification. It is a component of WebSphere Application Server Version 6. A critical component of IBM's on-demand Service Oriented Architecture, the IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry solves the problem of discovery of technical components for an enterprise and its partners by:
For example, the IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry could be used in the following way within a larger enterprise: A company has a legacy application that provides telephone numbers and Human Resources (HR) information about employees. This is turned into a Web service and published to the registry. A developer in the same company needs to write an application for a procurement function that also needs to provide HR information to the supplier. The application should allow the supplier to have access to the employee account codes once the employee provides his name or serial number. Before Web services, the developer would have been in one of the following situations:
With UDDI, the developer can search for the Web service and reuse the existing technical component in their new application for the supplier in a matter of minutes. The developer saves time and gets the application up and running sooner than they would have otherwise, thereby increasing efficiency and saving the company time and money. The IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry was the first version 2 standard-compliant UDDI registry for private enterprise work. The IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.0 builds upon previous versions and:
What's new in UDDI Version 3
The main aspects of the UDDI Version 3 specification that are provided within WebSphere Application Server Version 6 are as follows (there are also some additional capabilities provided by the IBM WebSphere UDDI Registry in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.0 which are described in a section below) :
Improved recognition of the importance of Private UDDI Registries
These are registries that are installed, owned, managed and controlled by a separate body such as a department within a company, a company, an industry consortium, or an e-marketplace.
Publisher-assigned keys
This allows the publisher of a UDDI entity to specify its key, rather than having a unique key assigned by the registry. As well as allowing more human-friendly, URI-based keys, this also makes it easier to manage multiple registries.
UDDI Information Model improvements
The UDDI data structures have been extended in a number of ways which improve the ability of UDDI to represent businesses and services via metadata.
Security Enhancements
The introduction of digital signatures provides additional security. Each of the main UDDI entities can be digitally signed, thus improving the integrity and trustworthiness of UDDI data.
Ownership transfer APIs
These allow the ownership of a UDDI entity to be transferred from one publisher to another.
UDDI Policy
Allows the behavior of a UDDI Registry to be defined by setting policy, thus recognizing the various different environments in which a UDDI Registry will be used.
HTTP GET support for UDDI entities
The HTTP GET service is extended beyond the scope for discovery URLs that is a part of the UDDI Version 2 specification. The service allows HTTP GET to be used to access XML representations of each of the UDDI data structures.
Additional Capabilities provided by the UDDI Registry
The Version 3 UDDI Registry provided in WebSphere Application Server Version 6.0 provides the following capabilities in addition to support for the UDDI Version 3 specification:
Version 2 UDDI Inquiry and Publish SOAP API compatibility
Backward compatibility is maintained for the Version 1 and Version 2 SOAP Inquiry and Publish APIs.
UDDI Admin Console extension
The WebSphere Application Server Version 6 Administrative Console includes a section which allows administrators to manage UDDI-specific aspects of their WebSphere environment. This includes the ability to set defaults for initialization of the UDDI node (such as its node ID), and to set the UDDI Version 3 Policy values.
UDDI Registry Administrative Interface
A JMX administrative interface allows administrators to manage UDDI-specific aspects of the WebSphere environment programmatically.
Multi-database support
The UDDI data is persisted to a registry database. In WebSphere Application Server Version 6 the databases that the UDDI Registry supports are DB2, Cloudscape, and Oracle . Support is provided for remote access to these databases.
User-defined Value Set support
This allows users to create their own categorization schemes or value sets, in addition to the standard schemes, such as NAICS, that are provided with the UDDI registry.
UDDI Utility Tools
UDDI Utility Tools allow importing and exporting of entities using the UDDI Version 2 API.
UDDI user interface
The UDDI user console supports the Inquiry and Publish APIs providing a similar level of support for the Version 3 APIs as was offered for UDDI Version 2 in WebSphere Application Server Version 5.
UDDI Version 3 Client
The IBM Java Client for UDDI Version 3 is a Java client for UDDI which handles the construction of raw SOAP requests for the client application. It is a JAX-RPC client and uses Version 3 datatypes generated from the UDDI Version 3 WSDL and schema. These datatypes are serialized or deserialized to the XML which constitutes the raw UDDI requests.
UDDI Version 2 Clients The following clients for UDDI Version 2 requests are provided: