On 3 February 2005, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced that its members have approved UDDI v. 3.0.2 as an OASIS Standard. New features in v. 3.0.2 include:

• Support for digital signatures, which will allow UDDI to deliver a higher degree of data integrity and authenticity.
• Extended discovery features, which combine multistep queries used in prior versions into a single-step complex query. Subqueries can also be nested within a single query, allowing client machines to narrow their searches more efficiently.
• A change in the underlying mechanism for pointers to actual services, from Globally Unique Identifiers to the more Web-centric Universal Resource Identifier.

UDDI offers a standardized mechanism for discovering Web services, and is supported by major Web services platform vendors. Although UDDI is foundational, its adoption by enterprises has lagged behind that of the other cornerstones of Web services — SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language). Gartner surveys show that fewer than 10 percent of businesses use UDDI for their service-oriented architecture (SOA) registries.

UDDI v. 3.0.2 serves enterprise needs better than prior implementations, through increased trust mechanisms and more robust categorization and security capabilities. Gartner clients have not stated that a lack of the features now provided by v. 3.0.2 has stopped them from adopting UDDI. Nonetheless, we believe that the use of UDDI will grow as businesses recognize that it provides benefits for internal uses and can be used as the basis for a development-time repository. We also believe that UDDI may eventually merge with alternative technologies, such as XMethods and ebXML Registry, which are used as much as UDDI.

Recommendations for businesses implementing SOAs:

• Evaluate UDDI v. 3.0.2 as a means of building a registry of service-oriented business applications (SOBAs). Without a registry, you may waste valuable development resources, because key individuals, divisions and partners will find it difficult to locate Web services.
• Ask Web services vendors when they will support v 3.0.2 in product offerings and how they will provide upgrade paths to v. 3.0.2.
• Standardize naming conventions for Web services and SOBAs. Semantics are crucial in the management of Web services registry implementations such as UDDI.

Analytical Sources: Charles Abrams, David Mitchell Smith and Ray Valdes, Gartner Research

Recommended Reading and Related Research

• "Be Vigilant When Adopting Web Services Standards" — More than half of Web services protocols will have been consolidated by the end of 2007. By Whit Andrews
• "SOBAs Depend on Effective Use of Web Service Standards" — Successful development and deployment of SOBAs requires the use of key Web service standards. By Ray Valdes and Charles Abrams

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