What are some good alternatives to a UDDI registry?

Question

I work as an intern Application Developer at a large organization prototyping SOA. I'm brand new to web services and technologies such as WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, and so on.

In the past week, I have been having a great deal of difficulty understanding UDDI, and how to use it effectively. The general consensus on the internet is that UDDI is dead, either too complex, unneeded, or a hindrance for most use cases. Some websites hint that UDDI is only useful as an internal registry within an organization and it's close business partners, rather than the universal business registry for which it was designed. You can see StackOverflow's attitude towards UDDI by reading some of the answers and comments on these questions:

• Is the public UDDI movement dead or, was it ever alive?
• How does SOA service discovery (UDDI) work in practice?
• Does A Web Service Have To Be Registered?
• Help understanding web services

What are some alternatives to UDDI? What are other ways that web services can be published so that developers can find a description and technical details without any of the complexity that UDDI seems to have? Is there any good business case for actually using a UDDI registry?

Answer 1

There are many open source registry/repository alternatives to UDDI.

I am an Architect at WSO2, so my answer could be biased - anyway WSO2 is not the only open source alternative.

The WSO2 Governance Registry is an open source, integrated SOA registry-repository, which supports you to efficiently manage your organization's growing SOA. The WSO2 Governance Registry provides an easy-to-use metadata repository complete with support for full versioning, lifecycle management, a rich model for users/roles/permissions, and social features such as tagging, rating and comments. You can easily add services and other resources through the web-based user interface.

WSO2 Governance Registry also has the WS-Discovery support.

WS-Discovery is a technical specification that defines a multicast discovery protocol to locate services on a local network.

You can read more from here.