UDDI Services provides Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) capabilities for sharing information about Web services within an organization's intranet, between business partners on an extranet, or on the Internet. UDDI Services can help improve the productivity of developers and information technology (IT) professionals with more reliable and manageable applications. With UDDI Services you can prevent duplication of effort by promoting reuse of existing development work.

Microsoft® UDDI Services provides developers and IT administrators with the following benefits:

A scalable solution for organizing, discovering, reusing, and managing Web services and other programmable resources
A standards-based infrastructure that is compliant with Version 3 of the UDDI application programming interface (API) specifications
Categorization schemes for describing providers and their Web services that you can customize to meet the needs of your organization
Integration with various development tools
User-friendly administration with the UDDI Services snap-in

Installation options

You can deploy UDDI Services with a stand-alone installation, or you can choose from a variety of configuration options with a distributed installation in an enterprise environment.

Stand-alone installation

Use a stand-alone installation for developer prototyping or other low-volume scenarios that involve a limited number of simultaneous users.

Distributed installation

We recommend a distributed installation for enterprise-wide implementations or other high-volume scenarios in which access times, availability, and reliability are of greater importance.

In a distributed installation of UDDI Services, the UDDI Services Web Application, the UDDI Services Notification Service, and the UDDI Services Database are installed on different servers. This type of installation can provide a fault-tolerant and responsive configuration because it places each of the UDDI Services components on a separate server, a server cluster, or a Web farm. The way in which you deploy the components is based on how you want to load-balance your installation.

UDDI Services site

An installation of UDDI Services consists of the following role services:

UDDI Services Database
UDDI Services Web Application
UDDI Services Notification Service

A set of UDDI Services Database, Web Application, and Notification Service servers that have the same configuration is referred to as a UDDI Services “site.” The Web server component may be hosted on the same server as the database component, or it may be hosted across multiple servers. Multiple Web servers at different locations that are connected to the same database component are part of the same site because they share the same database. The Notification Service component may be hosted on the same server as the database component, on one of the Web servers, or on a separate server. A site can have only one instance of the Notification Service.

Components that are part of the same site also share a set of configuration settings that control how the site behaves as a whole. These settings include user group mappings to security groups, the types of authentication that the site supports, and additional cryptography and encryption settings.

In a stand-alone installation, the Web server component, Notification Service component, and the database are installed on a single server.

UDDI Services Database

The UDDI Services Database provides data storage services for a site. You can install it into a database instance on an existing installation of Microsoft SQL Server®.

In addition to storing site data, the UDDI Services Database also stores all site-wide configuration settings, such as the name of a site, its user group mappings, and all security settings for the site.

UDDI Services Web Application

The UDDI Services Web Application uses Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0. The Web user interface (UI) provides search, publishing, and coordination capabilities.

This component provides support for the UDDI APIs and for Windows® Integrated Authentication, UDDI publisher authentication, or a combination of the two on both the Web UI and API interfaces.

UDDI Services Notification Service

The UDDI Services Notification Service provides subscription-based notifications on user-defined collections of service metadata.

Interacting with UDDI Services

Developers can publish, discover, and share Web services by using the following interfaces:

UDDI Services Web User Interface: Provides search, publishing, subscription, and coordination features that are compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer® and Netscape Navigator 4.5 or later.
Visual Studio .NET Add Web Reference Interface: Provides Web service discovery and integration in Microsoft Visual Studio® through UDDI Services.
UDDI API Interface: Supports the UDDI version 3.0 API and enables developers to publish, subscribe, discover, share, and interact with Web services directly through their development tools and business applications.

For more information about APIs for developers, see the Microsoft UDDI SDK (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81040).

Administrators can manage UDDI Services by using a set of administration tools, including a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in, that provide local and remote administration capabilities. UDDI management interfaces include the following:

UDDI Services snap-in: This Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in is installed when you install the Administration Tools. You can perform many configuration and management tasks with the UDDI Services snap-in.
UDDI Services Web UI: Administrators can use the Web UI to perform management and coordination tasks.
Additional administration tools: You can perform various management tasks by using administration tools. You can use these tools to create categorization schemes, export and import data entities, back up and restore a database, and back up and restore configuration settings.

These tools are installed when you install Administration Tools. They are located under the bin/ folder in the UDDI Services installation folder:
- uddiconfig.exe: A command-line tool that applies configuration settings from an XML document to UDDI Services components or retrieves configuration settings from UDDI Services components and stores them in an XML document.
- uddidataexport.exe: A wizard that you can use to select providers or models that are hosted in a UDDI site and export their details to an XML file.
- uddicatschemeeditor.exe: A user interface editor for creating and modifying categorization schemes that comply with UDDI Services.
- Backup.exe: A command-line tool that backs up or restores the UDDI Services Database hosted on a local instance of SQL Server.
- Bootstrap.exe: A command-line tool that loads XML data such as exported UDDI data entities and categorization schemes into the UDDI Services Database.
- Uddimigrate.exe: A command-line tool that enables data migration from a UDDI Services 2.0 site to a UDDI Services 3.0 site.

Overview of UDDI Services