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Why UDDI Will Work
Tim Smith of The Stencil Group pointed out a white paper that The Stencil Group put together concerning UDDI [?] . With UDDI's six month birtday, they say that it's building momentum, and postulate about why it will work in the end. Check out UDDI.org for other information as well.
I do wish that Everything would just get a bit faster....
Who manages the site? Are they working on a 56k modem or something?
I'll be happy to offer advice on their bandwidth.
The post is a troll.
While IBM sold machines to Germany that they used to perform the deportations, IBM had no idea about the Final Solution. Even the scholar who released the book about IBM and Germany acknowleged this (I read about it in Newsweek a couple of months ago).
IBM stopped dealing with Germany after the invasion of Poland. This was well before the U.S. entered the war, and before the SS even planned their elimination methods. The plan was drawn up by the #2 SS man in 1941 (I think 1941...), we just covered this in my Genocide course.
I don't know why the post was moderated up. The poster's UDDI "Nazi" connection is crap. "their missions were allied on the mighty Axis of powers" hahaha
When you first visit the site, they have a download section to the right. It states:
The following PDFs are available for download only.
Download only? What else would I do with them?
The idea that any kind of centralised service such as UDDI will ever manage to provide an easy, reliable and most importantly, a timely way of finding content online is pretty much preposterous to anyone who has ever used the net seriously. The net is just too anarchic and constantly changing for any such service to ever be reliable, and services like Yahoo have shown this, despite the millions of dollars of venture capital wasted.
Only search engines like Google have any hope of ever allowing people to discover information they need. The honeymoon days of web directories are over, and the technology has been shown to be the turkey it is. The net is a constantly changing place, and any static technology is doomed to failure.
Discovering a business partner is only a miniscule part of the b2b equation - think of the "business partner discovery" phase as reading about a person on a personals site. Merely reading about it doesn't constitute a successful "transaction". Similarly, just because GE or GM can locate my products on the web doesnt mean they can transact with me. The ability to transact depends on my e-biz infrastructure and my back office ERP system. Just type the words "laptop + 550MHZ" in Google. It will throw up hundreds of results. Does this constitute enough information for one to buy a laptop from these vendors or resellers? Also, what are the odds of industrial procurement managers typing in the words "concentrated sulfuric acid" or "3 inch valve" in Google? These companies have existing relationship with suppliers. It is the supplier who has to reach out to more customers, not the other way around. For a supplier to transact with a large corporation, it has to be of a certain size/credibility/revenue et al. No amount of web-based description/discovery will ever replace this. UDDI is old hat, being rehashed by a group of companies that are desparately trying to keep stock market's interest alive in the B2B sector. I have no doubts - b2b is here to stay and it will become a viable channel for companies to participate in. UDDI represents a really, small step in that direction.
As a developer working on a Web Services Development Platform, it is very important to me that UDDI and the web services revolution succeed. I think they certainly have that capability; Web Services are here to stay, and UDDI will probably become pretty useful in a year or two. However, there is no doubt that there are significant problems with UDDI as it now stands. Here are a couple, and you can email me if you're interested in more.
1) No fact-checking mechanism:
As it now stands, any business can go to one of the main UDDI providers (Ariba, Microsoft, and IBM), and register their company. This company could be legitimate, could be pornographic, or could be entirely false and fraudulent. Moderation and arbitration is always a tricky subject, as demonstrated by the last couple hundred WIPO cases, and this case is no exception. If I register in IBM's UDDI directory as "Microsoft Corporation," who decides that I'm not actually Bill Gates? If I register a fraudulent service, charge for it, and then screw my customers, who is liable? With a rotating management (executives from each of the three administration companies take turns being in charge), how are UDDI placement rules defined and enforced?
At the last UDDI advisory board meeting, the proposed answer was "self-administration." The administrators believe that as UDDI grows in popularity, there will be service providers offering background checks and ratings, similar to the Gomez reviews for B-to-C providers. I can almost accept this explanation, but it is certainly not in place yet.
2) No standardization of entries:
At its heart, the point of UDDI is to find services. These standards-based services are supposed to be available for use and integration by consumers, businesses, etc. Not only are the service descriptions buried beneath several levels of marketing, company information, and other useless junk, but there is also currently no standardization of entries. The standards are there, the services are there, but they aren't being referenced correctly....and that defeats the purpose. At the lowest level (the green pages referenced in the article), each Web Service should have a service description file, written in WSDL (Web Services Description Language), that specifies available methods, inputs, and outputs. Currently, the lowest level is a hodgepodge of text, Word documents, phone numbers, and a very few WSDL files.
Even if the services were available, the UDDI administrators have not released their web-based search interface yet. Visit http://www-3.ibm.com/services/uddi/find.htm to see an example....the "Find Services" button is unavailable, six months after UDDI's adoption.
We need some form of standardization, and it's not coming any time soon. At the UDDI advisory meeting, this question was pretty much blown off. There is nothing planned for the next two UDDI iterations that will fix this situation, and that means a couple of years at least. If the idea is to have our machines access and execute the services without user intervention, UDDI is a far cry from done.
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As it stands now, UDDI is relatively unusable. I have high hopes for its future, but I think smaller directories and private service repositories will be quite a bit more useful until UDDI gets past its toddler stage. In-fighting between the administrator companies will probably delay this process, especially since UDDI won't cause money to flow directly back into their pockets any time soon.