is uddi used anymore or is it's functionality now encompassed by wcf?

Question

does anybody use uddi anymore? Or is it's functionality now encompasses by WCF? Does Azure change anything regarding to the usefulness of UDDI? Can you please give me a practical example when UDDI was used?

Answer 1

UDDI is dead, the idea behind UDDI was to discover web services and their capabilities in some sort of web services marketplace. IBM, Microsoft, and I think WebMethods operated public UDDI servers, but those were shutdown a few years ago probably due to lack of interest.

In the real word it seems that you can just put your WSDL description of a web service on the same server that is hosting the web service. Also many frameworks will generate the WSDL for you from your code and existing xsd files using the principle of convention over configuration, see spring web services for an example.

Answer 2

q: does anybody use uddi anymore? a: Yes it is used and believe it or not, people still develop for it.

q: is it's functionality now encompasses by WCF? a: No, not at all. WCF does implement something called WS-Discovery, which uses multicast discovery to find implementations of a specific interface, however little other information is sharable through that.

q: Does Azure change anything regarding to the usefulness of UDDI? a: Not sure what a web hosting platform has to do with the usefulness of UDDI. You still need to advertise, discover and consume services.

q: Can you please give me a practical example when UDDI was used? a: When it was used? probably since 2001. How it was used?

1) Dynamic web service clients that look up service binding information at runtime. 2) Users searching for providers of a service (promote code reuse) 3) Runtime governance, see Jboss Overlord