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Introduction

UDDI has several different uses, based on the perspective of who is using it. The point of view of business analysts and software developers are here reviewed.

Business analysts's perspective

From a business analyst's perspective, UDDI Registries can be compared to various types of services already available on the Internet:

• Search engines "à la Google"
  Search engines allow registering Web sites. Classically, the content of the Web site is indexed and the lookup mechanism is based on keywords. Some search engines also provide a directory facility that allows finding Web sites by themes or even take into account meta information located in the header portion of Web pages in order to index Web sites more accurately.
  
  While UDDI provides services similar to search engines, the information registered in a UDDI Registry may not be limited to the company Web site. Actually, a company may not have any Web site and still be listed in an UDDI Registry, for example, for the phone-based services it provides. Conversely, a company could also have many Web sites, each dedicated to specific business activities, and have the opportunity to register them as specific services of a single business entity. UDDI also differentiates itself by searches that are more sophisticated and standardised across UDDI registry implementations thanks to the native support for categorization and identifiers.
  
• White and Yellow pages services
  White and Yellow pages services allow registering information on a business. White pages provides basic information on a business such as contact information; yellow pages add classification such as "manufacturing" or "software".
  
  UDDI provides services similar to traditional white and yellow pages services. In addition to traditional white and yellow pages information, UDDI also provides additional mechanisms to model business relationships between entities such as holding-subsidiary relationships. UDDI, thanks to its "green pages" functionality, also adds a new dimension to the description of the activities of a company by providing a means to detail its on-line and off-line services.

 

From a business analyst's perspective, UDDI makes it easier to identify and get details on services that may be included in business processes. As XML-based Web services mature, it is to be expected that technologies like WSDL, the Web Services Description Language, will be more systematically used to describe the technical duties involved in connecting to XML-based Web services while other emerging technologies like WSFL, the Web Services Flow Language, or WSCL, the Web Services Conversation Language, will be used to implement business processes from Web services composition.

Software developers's perspective

From a software developers's perspective, UDDI Registries can themselves be seen as sophisticated XML-based Web services with a well-defined API allowing publishing services (i.e. storing them in the UDDI registries) and querying UDDI registries for businesses and services matching various criteria.

Software developers interact with UDDI registries using raw XML-based messages that comply with the formats described in the UDDI Programmer's API of the UDDI specification, or make use of higher-level APIs such as Ruddi in order to abstract the low-level XML-messaging details in favour of a higher-level object-oriented API.

From a software developer's perspective, UDDI standardises the way information can be published or queried to and from a registry. Classical search engines and white and yellow pages services don't provide such facility, or only provide, such as Google, proprietary XML-based interfaces.

As XML-based Web services mature, it is to be expected that technologies like WSDL, the Web Services Description Language, will be more systematically used to describe the technical duties involved in connecting to XML-based Web services. Using code generation tools, software developers can convert these WSDL specifications to software libraries handling the XML conversation behind the scene. As a result, getting started interacting with XML-based Web services can be just a matter of minutes to experienced software developers. Also, UDDI, in its version 3.0, provides a subscription API allowing being notified whenever an UDDI registration changes, including the technical specification of on-line XML-based Web services.

Business analysts and software developers's complimentary perspective

Business analysts with specific knowledge of the business problem will most likely use the official UDDI Business Registries as well as UDDI portals to discover potentially interesting services and partners. Such UDDI portals are already popping up. Among them, BindingPoint1, for example, provides business and technical information on all Web services published in the UDDI Business Registries, as well as ratings, reviews, and general support.

Software developers, and especially software architects, will validate the technical compatibility of a service identified by business analysts with the infrastructure or technology practices in place within their company. For example, a potential partner using CORBA as on-line core technology may not fit the IT requirements of a company relying on Microsoft technology, and inversely.

As XML-based Web services mature, just-in-time integration could be adopted, when relevant, over design-time integration. In this context, business analysts would identify non-functional requirements and business policies to be considered at design time by software developers so that dynamic binding to XML-based Web services could be provided at runtime between business partners.