I have spent the past few weeks educating myself on WebSphere Service Registry and Repository which became generally available last Friday. This is one of the new products forming part of the today’s SOA launch. The launch has focused on how the product can be used to enforce the governance of services (through the use of a state machine to define the service lifecycle) but, given my focus on all things ESB, my main interest is in the use of the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository to support dynamic allocation of service endpoints.
The product provides both Java and Web service APIs to allow the registry to be queried and to retrieve artefacts from the repository. Concurrent with the general availability of the product, a free WebSphere Message Broker Category 1 SupportPac has been released which provides broker nodes to interact with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. It can be expected that a future release of IBM’s other ESB product will also provide similar functionality.
Other highlights include the use of OWL to define ontologies for classification and, for the developer, an Eclipse plugin to enable retrieval of artefacts from the repository.
As with any first release, there is obviously the scope for additional functionality. Perhaps the most obvious ommission is the lack of any integration with UDDI. Given the iterative approach that was used to develop the product, input from customers participating in the early access programme was often used to prioritise features. As I have yet to come across a customer actually using UDDI, then perhaps it is therefore not surprising that this support did not make the first cut.
For more of the technical details behind the markeing material, see the InfoCenter. I also hope to provide some more entries here on my initial experiences with the product.
Note that the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository InfoCenter is not yet complete and will continue to be updated every week until the end of this month so check back regularly. Also, be sure to check out the first developerWorks article in a series introducing the capabilities of the product.
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