An independent group developing one of the four foundation protocols for Web services Tuesday released version three of its specification and turned its work over to a standards body.
UDDI.org, a collection of nearly 300 vendors and end-user organizations, has spent the past two years developing the Universal Description, Discovery, Integration specification, a sort of yellow pages for Web services. UDDI is a way for companies to locate potential business partners and determine what sorts of Web services they offer and how to interact with them.
On Tuesday, UDDI.org submitted its work to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which is working on other Web services protocols namely in the area of security. OASIS officials said it would take about a month to form a UDDI technical committee.
"If UDDI is to become core to the way enterprises use Web services this has to go through a standards body," says Jamie Lewis, CEO and research chair of the Burton Group. "It can't just be a group of vendors who wrote a specification. This is the right thing to do."
UDDI, along with the Simple Object Access Protocol, the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and XML itself make up the foundation of a Web services architecture.
Corporations have mostly rejected the notion of a public UDDI registry citing security and intellectual property concerns, but many are evaluating the technology for use internally as a way to catalog their Web services and make them easier to locate and reuse.
"In today's business climate it is the internal projects that are taking off," says Chris Kurt, general program manager for UDDI.org. "But people should now be confident that this will be something that is standardized."
UDDI.org was developed by IBM, Microsoft and Ariba in September of 2000. Version 3 of the specification, has new security features built around support for XML-based digital signatures. The new specification also supports WSDL, allows users to move local registry entries to public or private registries, and adds new application programming interfaces to support notifications of changes to a registry.
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