IBM calls for new SOA discovery standard

IBM's clients are experiencing an 'integration pain point' with web services standards

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) have stretched the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) web services standard to the limit, prompting IBM to call for a new standard.

"Our clients are telling us that they have an integration pain point," Andrew Hately, a manager at IBM's Software Group, told vnunet.com. "We need to [create a new standard] and the time is now." 

The UDDI standard allows the publisher of a web service to provide additional information about that service such as technical details, the identity of the publisher and industry categorisation.

UDDI has also found use with SOAs. But vendors are now increasingly experiencing the limitations of a web services standard in applications with SOAs.

A web service is purely focused on providing a way for disparate applications to communicate over a network. SOAs, by contrast, zoom in on providing software building blocks that can be reused across several applications within a company.

Although the two have much in common, there are major differences. The focus on providing reusable software components means that SOAs require different information about services than do web services.

UDDI will not allow for role-based access to services, does not let companies manage a service's life cycle to enable governance, and does not allow for services to be searched, explained Sunil Murthy, a manager for WebSphere Service Registry and Repository at IBM's Software Group.

"There is opportunity to look at this set of issues and look at a concerted industry standard to foster the integration required and that focuses on SOAs," Murthy told vnunet.com. 

IBM last week released version 6.0.1 of its WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, a software component that allows companies to manage and maintain the services published as part of an SOA.

In order to enable some of the more advanced features, IBM was forced to deviate from the UDDI standard.