Yes, there are people using UDDI. Particularly in the military, government, and banks.
The most common use I've seen is as a software asset management system. Large corporations have many different development groups, which leads to lots of duplicative application development. They are beginning to use UDDI as a central registry to keep track of all their applications. When a new project begins, a developer can query the registry to see if someone's already developed a service that he can use. The other place where UDDI is very useful is in the supply/sell chain. If you deal with many suppliers and/or distributors, it's very helpful to point them to one location that provides information about all of the interfaces that they would need to connect their systems. If you only have a few APIs, then maybe it isn't necessary, and you can just point them to the WSDL files. Obviously, as the number of APIs increases, so does the management headache. If you're trying to set up an e-marketplace, I think UDDI is a "must have". The key to making UDDI useful is custom taxonomies. If your don't use categorization, then UDDI is nothing more than a directory. If you do use categorization, UDDI becomes a multidimensional index. I agree with you that public UDDI isn't particularly valuable today, and it won't be until the various industries create a set of standard interfaces. There's a lot of good work going on in the industry groups: ACORD (insurance), TaxML, LegalXML, etc. Anne > -----Original Message----- > From: Dennis Sosnoski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 2:52 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Document style web services > > > Steve Loughran wrote: > > >As an aside, does *anyone* use UDDI? > > > >-steve > > > I'm personally really puzzled by the logic behind UDDI. As far as I can > see there's a huge gap between the reality of what can be done using > UDDI and the marketing concept behind it (which seems to be that you can > have your programs automatically look up and connect to services). > > Where UDDI starts to make sense to me is when you have standardized > interfaces to particular types of services - then the dynamic lookup and > use is actually possible. I don't know of any types of services that are > actually standardized in this manner, though. Perhaps ebXML is the > missing piece of the puzzle here. Without interface standardization, > simple web-page directories of services (such as XMethods and the like) > seem far more useful than UDDI. > > This is not knocking UDDI - I think it's a great tool, I just don't see > any real use for it. :-) I'd love to be corrected on this if I'm > overlooking something. > > - Dennis > > Dennis M. Sosnoski > Enterprise Java, XML, and Web Services Support > http://www.sosnoski.com > >
