UDDI has been around for almost three years now. It has gone from an initial proposal by three companies (Ariba, IBM, and Microsoft), to a consortium effort (www.uddi.org) with a community of hundreds, and finally into the hands of the OASIS standards body.

Current standards for SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI have no explicit support for the versioning and deprecation of Web services. This article introduces a means for Web service versioning and deprecation that is lightweight and flexible, and requires minimal development effort.

The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specifications provide a standardized way for businesses to discover each other over the Internet and find details of services provided. UDDI is a combination of White Pages (contacts, addresses, telephone numbers), Yello...