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I work as an intern Application Developer at a large organization prototyping SOA. I'm brand new to web services and technologies such as WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, and so on.

In the past week, I have been having a great deal of difficulty understanding UDDI, and how to use it effectively. The general consensus on the internet is that UDDI is dead, either too complex, unneeded, or a hindrance for most use cases. Some websites hint that UDDI is only useful as an internal registry within an organization and it's close business partners, rather than the universal business registry for which it was designed. You can see StackOverflow's attitude towards UDDI by reading some of the answers and comments on these questions:

What are some alternatives to UDDI? What are other ways that web services can be published so that developers can find a description and technical details without any of the complexity that UDDI seems to have? Is there any good business case for actually using a UDDI registry?

Community
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Griff George
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    UDDI didn't work because it relied on a standards-based mechanism to classify, catalog and manage web services no matter the type of business. Businesses needed to adopt this (complex) standard and all talk the same language to be able to discover each other on the web. It was a very hard thing to do and UDDI failed. It is simpler to adopt standards when there are few partners involved, so this is why UDDI is not fully dead but lives in some private internal registries. That aside, Google can index WSDL files. Here is a very simple alternative to UDDI: http://www.google.com/?q=filetype:wsdl –  Sep 02 '11 at 20:19
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    You'll find that UDDI was a failure not only for the reasons stated by @dpb, but also because in most circumstances, it is totally unnecessary. – John Saunders Sep 02 '11 at 20:49
  • @John Saunders All of that makes sense, but is there a solution where web services can find each other dynamically? This seems to be the goal within my organization. – Griff George Sep 05 '11 at 17:34
  • In most organizations, it is not desirable for web services to find each other. It is desirable that some human tell the services where their peers are located. – John Saunders Sep 05 '11 at 22:05
  • For a possible alternative read Using DNS for REST Web Service Discovery(http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-discovery-dns). Also there is a discovery feature if you're in the .NET 4 world using WCF (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335779.aspx). – Schalk Nov 16 '11 at 13:17

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There are many open source registry/repository alternatives to UDDI.

I am an Architect at WSO2, so my answer could be biased - anyway WSO2 is not the only open source alternative.

The WSO2 Governance Registry is an open source, integrated SOA registry-repository, which supports you to efficiently manage your organization's growing SOA. The WSO2 Governance Registry provides an easy-to-use metadata repository complete with support for full versioning, lifecycle management, a rich model for users/roles/permissions, and social features such as tagging, rating and comments. You can easily add services and other resources through the web-based user interface.

WSO2 Governance Registry also has the WS-Discovery support.

WS-Discovery is a technical specification that defines a multicast discovery protocol to locate services on a local network.

You can read more from here.

Prabath Siriwardena
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Other types of look stuff up at a known location:

  • ebXML Registry

Options based on multicast networking

  • mDNS/Bonjour/Avahi/ZeroConf
  • WS-Discovery
  • UPnP
spy
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Could try using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) or similar product.

Julie
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