Posted by Dan Foody
I recently had a discussion with one of the key industry analysts covering the SOA governance space. He said that the need for UDDI is going away – to be clear, registries and repositories are very important, but the UDDI technical standard is no longer a key driver.
UDDI had promised to be the universal standard for communicating with registries, and there were no real competing standards. So, what’s led UDDI to be on its deathbed? A few things, I think:
- Repositories have become much more important than registries and UDDI wasn’t really great for repositories.
- UDDI tried to be all things to all people which made it way too complex. What, you say you don’t want visions of tModels dancing in your head?
- At the same time, the UDDI mechanisms for searching and change notification were very "primitive" – this meant that federation across repositories, and end user tools for using registries were all proprietary approaches.
- UDDI never got a critical mass of tools using it for access to registries – this was probably due to all the issues above.
This is a long time coming but welcome news for anyone that’s ever had the “pleasure” of using UDDI. On the other hand, if you’re a UDDI vendor, take a big breath and remember the 5 stages you’ll go through: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
No doubt this does leave a gap – we have no widely adopted standard for integrating with or federating registries and (more importantly) repositories. Hopefully all the registry/repository vendors will get together and fill the gap soon – preferably with something that’s simple and useful. The status quo (with or without UDDI) where every SOA infrastructure product must custom-integrate with every registry/repository product just can’t be sustained.
Rest in peace UDDI. Just do it quickly, please.