UDDI - Who cares?
"The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specifications define a registry service for Web services and for other electronic and non-electronic services. A UDDI registry service is a Web service that manages information about service providers, service implementations, and service metadata. Service providers can use UDDI to advertise the services they offer. Service consumers can use UDDI to discover services that suit their requirements and to obtain the service metadata needed to consume those services."
In my opinion, UDDI is either pointless (mostly) or ahead of its time. The one thing I can tell you is that its time is not now; just like it wasn't a few years ago when UDDI first came out. Everyone was touting UDDI as the great panacea for how enterprises and organizations will automatically publish and discover one anothers web services. I just don't think that is realistic. Lets take the enterprise example. Most groups develop apps for their use only; they don't develop interoperable apps. And if they did and there was another group that was interested in using their APIs, they wouldn't look them up in some directory, they'd go directly to the source. Even if you did want a listing of all the public web services in an org, you could put up a simple web page. I don't see the demand being strong enough to warrant a separate infrastructure. The other major problem with sharing anything within an enterprise is that when the owners of the components change something, they don't want to notify everyone that is using their component so they usually don't, and things break (hence one of the major reasons people don't like to share). And don't tell me versioning solves the problem because it doesn't.
The reason I said it could be ahead of its time is because really, UDDI should be the solution. If enterprises were more organized about development, UDDI could help solve the sharing problem. So in cases where you have groups within an enterprise that are highly motivated to share or multiple external organizations that are highly motivated to share, UDDI *might* be a good way to track the available web services. I'd love to see some non-trival examples of how UDDI worked well. The "Discovery" part of UDDI I really don't get and don't see a practical use for.
More open standards or not, my crystal ball says I'll be saying I told you so about UDDI in another 3 years. That's not to say there won't be some pockets of implementations, but I'm talking on a large-scale, I can't see it happening. And this is to say nothing of the underlying technology behind UDDI. This is more of a people and process issue. If you think I'm way off base, I'd love to here from you, shoot me an email.
