e2001 Your Digital Future - Bangkok Post Special Supplement

WEB SERVICES

UDDI to make business partnering easier

Tony Waltham

UDDI _ which stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration _ was designed to make it easy for businesses to create partnerships and new business models using platform-neutral application components called web services.

IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp jointly developed a language standard for the new UDDI business directory, which is designed to fuel business-to-business commerce and was announced in September 2000.

The standard, called Web Services Description Language (WSDL), is a mixture of both IBM's Network Accessible Services Specification Language and Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) contract language.

SOAP is an open standards-based interoperability protocol that uses XML (Extensible Markup Language) to provide a common messaging format to link together applications and services anywhere on the Internet regardless of operating system, object model or programming language. The companies are evaluating the appropriate path for submitting the specification to the industry as a draft for standardisation.

A coalition of 36 vendors and consultants are working on the UDDI business directory, which, at its core, will be an XML-based holding tank for what businesses do, the services they offer and how they interface with their computing systems. The registry announced in early September is expected to support a number of APIs for gathering and offering information.