Discovering the Discovery Service?

One of the problems that always bothered me with UDDI is that you need to know a number of things in order to find something. Specifically, you need

1. The location of the UDDI services, at least the Inquiry
2. Information about what you're looking for
3. Optionally, credentials

So we need to know where UDDI is before we can look up the where the services are that we want to use? This is almost a catch 22 scenario. Consider a scenario where you have 1000s of web serivce clients, all depending on the UDDI server for figuring out how to route requests. What is the UDDI server location changes? Now you have a few angry IT guys to deal with.

Falling in line with most IT solutions of making things easier and reducing complexity, how do we remove the extra step of locating UDDI? There's a few options and they are all multicast based solutions.

• WS-Discovery (SOAP/UDP) - supported with Apache CXF and Microsoft.NET 4.0
• mDNS/Bonjour/Avahi - very popular with Apple products, not so much for other stuff
• Universal Plug'n Play - popular with games and firewalls, has a bad reputation

The jUDDI team has had a number of discussions about this and have opened a ticket to enable one of these capabilities in the future, currently slated for version 3.3.

If you happen to have an opinion on the subject, please feel free to share.