Universal Description, Discovery and Integration.

I hadn't thought of nor heard anyone speak of this early Web services standard since, oh, 2001 or so. In fact, when Paul Fremantle of WSO2 mentioned the recent release of their Carbon framework supported UDDI 3.0, I felt like Cabbie talking to Snake Pliskin in "Escape from New York," when he uttered the immortal line: "I thought you (DDI) was dead!" I might digress here for a moment to say that Ernest Borgnine's performance as Cabbie was sadly overlooked by the Academy!!

UDDI was created as a means of -- that's right -- describing Web services (using the Web Services Description Language -- WSDL), discovering them and integrating them into applications. UDDI was quite complex in its architecture, and limited by the fact that WSDL seemed to create a unique interface for every Web service, and seemed to fall by the wayside as RESTful Web services superceded SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.

Paul said he was not a fan of UDDI. "I felt that UDDI was broken, difficult, complex and it wasn't flexible. We added support for completeness, rather than the architectural correctness of the model." He further said he doesn't like to build software to a checklist, but had some key customers who needed the UDDI support for interoperability with legacy systems.

Perhaps the next iteration can add support for CORBA!