UDDI

Universal Discovery Description and Integration (UDDI) is the yellow pages of web services. As with traditional yellow pages, you can search for a company that offers the services you need, read about the service offered, and contact someone for more information. You can, of course, offer a web service without registering it in UDDI.

A UDDI directory entry is an XML file that describes a business and the services it offers. There are three parts to an entry in the UDDI directory.

• The "white pages" describe the company offering the service: name, address, contacts, and so on.

• The "yellow pages" include industrial categories based on standard taxonomies such as the North American Industry Classification System and the Standard Industrial Classification.

• The "green pages" describe the interface to the service in enough detail for someone to write an application to use the web service. The way services are defined is through a UDDI document called a Type Model or tModel. In many cases, the tModel contains a WSDL file that describes a SOAP interface to a web service, but the tModel is flexible enough to describe almost any kind of service.

The UDDI directory also includes several ways to search for the services you need to build your applications. For example, you can search for providers of a service in a specified geographic location or for a business of a specified type. The UDDI directory will then supply information, contacts, links, and technical data to allow you to evaluate which services meet your requirements.

Jade may provide UDDI discovery and publication in a future release. However, at present there is little usage of this feature in the community. In fact, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP have now closed their public UDDI nodes.