IBM vs UDDI War Heats Up

Blogger: Anne Thomas Manes

It appears that the "IBM vs UDDI" story is still getting some air play. Joe McKendrick, in the ZDNet SOA blog, writes, "IBM acknowledges bypassing UDDI; calls for new SOA registry standard".

According to Joe, IBM representatives say that UDDI was originally designed only to support the needs for web services discovery (not true), and that modern SOA efforts are not limited to web services. Specifically, they say that UDDI does not support role-based access control to service information, lifecycle management, and comprehensive search. Therefore the industry needs a new registry standard.

I especially love the last sentence in Joe's blog:

"The IBM reps quoted in the article could not predict what a new registry standard would or should look like, but said vendors should take their time in sorting things out."

Brilliant move on IBM's part!

Disrupt the market with FUD for the next 5 years while IBM produces a new standard that just so happens to correspond exactly with WSRR.  (It's a bit reminiscent of SCA and IBM WebSphere Process Server, actually.)

HP/Systinet, SOA Software, Software AG, and webMethods/Infravio have managed to implement very reasonable SOA governance solutions based on UDDI. Yes -- they extended UDDI, but the products are still UDDI-compliant, and they enable standards-based information exchange. And they do in fact support role-based access control to service information, lifecycle management, and comprehensive search.

I can only assume that IBM supports standards only when it's convenient for them to do so.

Comments

[Javier Cámara]

I just can't understand why UDDI is not used more. Take the plaging problem of endpoint management. Almost every person and tool out there seems just happy with hardwiring URLs in code, or using ad-hoc solutions such as property files, databases, or more bizarre ones to store endpoints. Registries are basic stuff in any distributed architecture, but for some reason, almost nobody uses them for SOA. They talk about high level SOA principles, while blowing away the basic one of "separate configuration from code".

I fully agree with you regarding UDDI: extend it, do not throw it away.