News

Lagging UDDI gets boost from OASIS

• By Rich Seeley
• May 21, 2003

In an attempt to boost the laggard standard in the Web services trinity, Boston-based OASIS (www.oasis-open.org) announced on Tuesday, May 20, that its members have ratified UDDI Version 2.0 as an OASIS Open Standard.

While software vendors, including IBM, define Web services as using SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, it has been difficult to find many applications making use of the latter. Research firm Gartner Group defines Web services as applications using any, but not necessarily all three, of the standards.

At this point, UDDI Version 2.0 appears to be an interim step toward a more secure way of creating directories for publishing Web services, which is expected to culminate with the completion of UDDI Version 3.0.

Uttam Narsu, vice president at Forrester Research Inc., described the V2.0 move as a concrete step toward the much-anticipated V3.0 specification. Other observers noted that the OASIS support promises to bring UDDI adoption more in line with the SOAP and WSDL specs.

Narsu said Forrester is optimistic about the future of the lagging standard. "We foresee UDDI adoption as critical to the realization of a service-oriented architecture, and expect to see a significant increase in its adoption over the next two years," he said.

IBM and Microsoft, which are both involved in the OASIS effort, were equally optimistic about the future of UDDI.

IBM's Tom Bellwood, co-chair of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee, contends that UDDI 2.0 is already being widely implemented. He noted that Version 2.0 provides the features companies need to manage business relationships in Web services and external taxonomy validation. Version 3.0 promises to enhance the standard further with support of multi-registry environments and digital signature features, he added.

Besides IBM and Microsoft, other vendors with members on the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee include Computer Associates, Fujitsu, Iona, Novell, Oracle, SAP, SeeBeyond and Sun Microsystems.