An independent group developing one of the four foundation protocols for Web services released Version 3 of its specification last week 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.
Last week, 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 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 of Burton Group. "It can't just be a group of vendors who wrote a specification. This is the right thing to do."
Once formed, the technical committee will submit the specification for formal standards review when it feels it is ready. The standards review would last three months. The designation should assure that network executives can expect interoperability between products that support the specification.
UDDI, Simple Object Access Protocol, Web Services Description Language and XML make up the foundation of a Web services architecture.
UDDI.org was developed by IBM, Microsoft and Ariba in September 2000 and the first test registry was launched in May 2001.
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. "People should now be confident that this will be something that is standardized." But Kurt says as the technology matures through OASIS, he thinks deployments of UDDI registries between trusted groups of business partners will become the norm.
As part of the maturation process, UDDI.org rolled out Version 3 of its specification. The specification has new security features built around support for XML-based digital signatures. The new specification also supports WSDL, lets users move local registry entries to public or private registries, and adds new APIs to support notifications of changes to the registry.
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