Configuring UDDI Services

The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) protocol provides a broad, standardized infrastructure that lets you describe and discover Web services. The UDDI registry is a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)–based Web service that locates Web services and programmable resources on a network. UDDI provides a foundation for developers and administrators to readily share information about Web services.

One problem with UDDI is that people think of it as a big, unsecured, centralized repository on the Internet that they would never use for their own businesses for fear of compromising their data. Most organizations simply wouldn't trust an untested third-party Web service to carry out important business logic for them. This fear is justified. After all, no one wants to let someone else implement important business logic in a Web service that's publicly exposed.

Microsoft realized that enterprises would adopt UDDI much more rapidly than business-to-business (B2B) users would. As a result, Windows Server 2003 includes UDDI Services, which lets companies run private UDDI services for intranet or extranet use and take advantage of the flexibility that UDDI offers without worrying about data privacy.

Implementing UDDI Services in Windows 2003
UDDI Services is a database-driven ASP.NET application that has both a UI and a Web services interface. Microsoft designed the UI to search for Web services, find providers of Web services, or manually enter Web services metadata. The Web services interface, which fully implements the UDDI 2.0 and UDDI 1.0 APIs, is used at runtime to perform tasks such as running queries against the registry and programmatically registering Web services. The database is implemented either as a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database or as a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) database. (To determine which database you should use, see the sidebar "SQL Server or MSDE?") UDDI Services also comes with an administrative console—the UDDI Services Console, which consists of a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in and a set of command-line tools that let you administer local or remote UDDI Services sites and perform database backups.

Before You Install UDDI Services
In a standalone UDDI Services installation, both the Web application and database reside on one computer running a member of the Windows 2003 family. The database resides on a SQL Server 2000 or a local MSDE database instance, and the Web application then connects to that instance. Most developers will want to install a standalone installation on their development workstations or servers. This solution is perfect for a limited number of users. For enterprisewide implementations, however, Microsoft recommends a distributed installation, which provides the most fault-tolerant and responsive configuration available because it places each of the UDDI Services components on separate servers, a server cluster, or a Web farm. How you decide to distribute the UDDI Services components depends on how you choose to load-balance your installation. MSDE doesn't include administrative tools and can't communicate across a network. For this reason, you can use MSDE only in standalone UDDI Services installations. To perform a distributed installation, you must be running Windows 2003, Enterprise Edition or Windows 2003, Datacenter Edition (these editions also support standalone installations). Windows 2003, Standard Edition supports only a standalone UDDI Services installation.

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