Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Setting Up a Service Registry
Problem
You want a centralized location in which to store your web services so that they can be dy-
namically discovered.
Solution
Try using an implementation of the Java UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integ-
ration) specification, such as the free and open source Apache jUDDI project.
Discussion
A UDDI registry provides a standard way of storing information about web services and
the organizations that provide them. Registries allow you to store, query, and update the in-
formation surrounding your SOAP-based web services. They support models for two basic
items: information about organizations, including government bodies, corporations, and busi-
ness units; and these organizations' requirements for accessing their services.
UDDI
jUDDI (pronouned “Judy”) is an Apache project implementing UDDI v2 (many commercial
products now support UDDI v3). The most recent release of Apache jUDDI is from December
2007, and it supports JDK 1.5 and Servlet 2.3. The registry is deployable as a WAR, and acts
as a frontend to a relational database.
Originally the idea with UDDI was this: businesses would create services and add them to a
registry, and then make the registry available to the public. The conglomeration of registries
in the world would act as a sort of Yellow Pages, in which software agents could be set up
to query service registries, discover services that matched their needs, and establish a busi-
ness relationship on the fly. Runtimes would use these agents to select and invoke services at
runtime, using a Java API called JAX-R.
Things never quite happened like this. To begin with, businesses don't (and probably
shouldn't) trust software to establish business relationships on the fly for them. Businesses es-
tablish relationships on the golf course, and with careful consideration. Developers still had to
integrate the services on which their software depended using the grizzly JAX-R API.
As a consequence, UDDI has waned significantly in popularity in recent years. That having
been said, there is some potential value in setting up a private, internal registery for your com-
