Web/E-business /

Vendors to link directory to Web services

By Deni Connor
Network World, 05/27/02

Three industry heavyweights are pushing competing plans for standardizing the way Web services information is secured, managed and distributed inside and outside corporate firewalls.

In unrelated efforts, Novell, Sun and Computer Associates are proposing that various directory technologies be used for building and improving Web services registries, as opposed to relational databases used today:

Novell submitted a draft in February to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that calls for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to be used, and is working on a product called UDDI Services for release later this summer. Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is a standard for building distributed Web-based registries that provide a "phone book" listing of companies and services they provide.

CA will introduce a product late this year that uses its eTrust directory as a platform for managing and replicating Web services with databases within firewalls.

Sun is readying a UDDI registry services product for release early this summer that will use its Sun ONE directory as a repository for UDDI data within firewalls.

Web services range from a collection of dynamic XML-based applications that can be located and executed over the Internet to simple interfaces for integrating unlike systems. The UDDI Community, the organization that provides a registry of these services, doesn't care which underlying infrastructure is used - whether it is an SQL database, XML database or directory.

"The UDDI Community has no particular view on how people implement the specification," says Siva Darivemula, market manager for WebSphere Strategic Business Initiatives at IBM and a member of the marketing committee for the UDDI Community.

Users and analysts have mixed opinions on how implementation should take place.

Peter Strifas, senior directory engineer for Mount Sinai-New York University Health Organization, says he sees advantages of directory and relational database technologies.

"I can run [a relational database] on some very reliable hardware so it's very highly scalable," Strifas says. "But, with Novell's DirXML and eDirectory, I can set up a directory tree to handle UDDI services and manage it via traditional tools and processes. That would be an advantage to installing a relational database with an XML layer on top, which would require specialized skills my organization may not have available."

Novell, Sun and CA say that directories already provide some of the capabilities that need to be bolted on to databases - features such as integrated resource management, authentication and access control, and replication and synchronization services that affect the global distribution of information.

"With a registry, you write to it a few times, read it a lot and need to have high-speed and secure access to it and the ability to replicate it," says Winston Bumpus, director of standards at Novell. "This is what directories are designed to do."

Don LeClair, vice president in CA's Office of the CTO, agrees.

"If you look at the kinds of structures UDDI registries have, they are basically multilayer hierarchies where you define your company and the services you offer," LeClair says. "Relational databases are not particularly well-suited to doing queries across hierarchies, so you have to do a lot of work that does those queries in a scalable, very fast way."

The current UDDI registries posted by IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard use relational databases to store information.