The beginning of the end for UDDI

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.