Putting UDDI to the test
 
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If you're trying to figure out what the whole Web services world is about then the next step, after you've researched the technologies, will be to get your hands on products and start playing.
The basics are easily tested - XML, XSD, SOAP and so on are pretty straightforward and are available in many products. But it is at the top end of the services model where products are only just coming available and that's where you really need to start exploring.
One of the most interesting and newest services in this area is the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
Sounds great but with such a grand vision, there's a lot of details to be filled in and experimentation required.
An interesting player in this emerging market is Systinet (www.systinet.com/). Systinet offers a UDDI server called WASP UDDI that you can implement for testing purposes for free.
WASP UDDI was developed using the company's WASP Server for Java and can be hosted on a servlet engines such as Tomcat or Jetty or enterprise application servers such as BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere. Underlying the server is a relational database server such as Oracle or Postgres.
There are two versions of WASP UDDI: Standard Edition exactly implements the UDDI V2 API specification (www.uddi.org/pubs/ProgrammersAPI-V2.00-Open-20010608.pdf).
The Enterprise Edition is based on the Standard Edition but with extra features. These include SuperInquiry, a more powerful query service than that required by the V2 specification, and proactive notification of component and application changes.
The WASP UDDI Enterprise Edition Notification Service also allows any applications to register for notifications on selected components subsets.
The final enhanced service of WASP UDDI Enterprise Edition is Secure inquiry. This supports authentication and authorization controls on inquiry requests - a potential weakness of a pure V2 implementations.
As I said, WASP UDDI in both versions is free for evaluation, development and testing. For deployment, pricing begins at $10,000 for a single CPU.
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Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World.
Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. Gibbs is also co-conspirator of the Vitally Important Information Web site.
Gibbs can be contacted at webapps@gibbs.com. Press releases to pr@gibbs.com.
