Creating Your Own Private UDDI Registry

he Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification and protocol work together to form define messages, application programming interfaces (APIs), and data structures for building distributed registries of Web services and storing the business and technical information associated with these services. UDDI is an OASIS standard. There are fundamentally two types of UDDI registries: public registries and private registries. This article shows you how to implement a private registry. First, however, here's a brief review of UDDI's high-level architecture.

UDDI High-Level Architecture
UDDI uses Web services and Web protocol standards and technologies, such as HTTP, XML, and SOAP (see Figure 1). UDDI defines a Web service discovery protocol, which lets clients find Web services, and a Web service description format, which lets clients understand what the Web services that they find do. A UDDI registry typically contains metadata for a service embodied within a Web service Description Language (WSDL) document.

Figure 1. How UDDI Fits In: The diagram illustrates how UDDI fits into the layers of technologies and protocols currently used for Web services.

You can use the information provided in a UDDI registry to perform three types of searches:

1. A white pages search returns basic information such as address, contact, and identifiers about a company and its services.
2. A yellow pages topical search retrieves information according to industrial categorizations and taxonomies, such as the NAICS, ISO3166, and UNSPSC classification systems.
3. A green pages service search retrieves technical information about Web services, as well as information describing how to execute these services.