How does SOA service discovery (UDDI) work in practice?

Question

I'm just reading up on SOA and the service registry / UDDI get mentioned regularly. It sounds nice but how is used in reality?

• Is the registry meant to decouple a logical service from its' physical implementation (port, url etc)?
• Is the registry meant to be browsed by a human looking for an interesting service to play with?
• Would it be 'wrong' to hard-wire an application to the services it uses?

Answer 1

I find it to be more theoretically useful than practically useful. It is infrequently implemented and infrequently used. In reality, DNS provides a sufficient abstraction tool for the location of resources on the network.