UDDI registries: Web service directories that can be referenced by bus-enabled web services

The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification defines a way to publish and discover information about web services. UDDI registries use the UDDI specification to publish directory listings of web services.

In the UDDI specification:
  • Each web service is owned by one business, and each business (and the web services it owns) is maintained by one Authorized Name.
  • One Authorized Name can own many businesses, and one business can own many web services.

The UDDI specification also associates web services with Technical models. Using these models, or generic categories, a UDDI registry user can search for a type of service, rather than needing to know the access details for a specific service.

For more general information about UDDI, see the UDDI community at uddi.org.

UDDI registries

There are Universal Business Registries (sometimes referred to as public UDDI registries) hosted worldwide, including one hosted by IBM. Enterprises can also host their own internal registries behind their firewalls (sometimes referred to as private UDDI registries) to better manage their internal implementation of web services. The IBM® WebSphere® UDDI Registry is an example of a private UDDI registry.

How the service integration technologies interact with UDDI registries

The service integration technologies interact with UDDI registries in two ways:
To enable your service integration bus-enabled web services to interact with a UDDI registry, you create one or more pointers to the registry. These pointers are known as UDDI references, and you create them as described in Creating a new UDDI reference. Each UDDI reference includes the following parameters:
  • The access points for the UDDI registry (the Inquiry URL and the Publish URL).
  • The Authorized Name (the User ID and Password) for the owner of one or more businesses in the UDDI registry.
You get the Authorized Name from the target UDDI registry. For more information, see Publishing a web service to a UDDI registry.

A given UDDI reference can only access the web services that are owned by the businesses that are owned by a single Authorized Name. Therefore if you have to access two web services in the same registry, and each service is owned by a different Authorized Name, then you must create two UDDI references.

When you create an inbound service, and you specify that the template WSDL file is located through a UDDI registry, you enter the following two parameters:
  • The UDDI reference that can access this service.
  • The service-specific part of the full service key that the UDDI registry has assigned to this service.
Note:

When a service is published to UDDI, the registry assigns a service key to the service.

After the service has been published you can get the service key from the target UDDI registry.

Here is an example of a full UDDI service key: 
uddi:blade108node01cell:blade108node01:server1:default:6e3d106e-5394-44e3-be17-aca728ac1791
The service-specific part of this key is the final part: 
6e3d106e-5394-44e3-be17-aca728ac1791
When you configure a bus-enabled web service to create entries in one or more UDDI registries, you enter the following two parameters:
  • The UDDI references (one for each registry) that can access the UDDI business category under which you want to publish this service.
  • The business key that identifies the UDDI business category.
To get a list of valid business keys, look up businesses in the UDDI registry. Here is an example of a UDDI business key: 
08A536DC-3482-4E18-BFEC-2E2A23630526

Bus-enabled web services interact with UDDI registries at the level of individual web services, and therefore do not use UDDI Technical models.

For more information see Publishing a web service to a UDDI registry.