The increasing number of South African companies employing services-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services and electronic business extensible markup language (ebXML) can take advantage of early access to the new Web service registry from Sun Microsystems.
"The Sun Service Registry (SSR) is included in the Web Services Developer Pack (WSDP) v1.6, which is available for download from the Sun Java Web site," says Tony Willis, engagement architect at Sun Microsystems SA.
Willis says any company committing to SOA and Web services projects, will sooner or later need a governance and management tool to keep track of services and manage associated metadata.
"The SSR exceeds the basic functionality of existing Web services registries to provide in-depth management and governance of services, enabling users to publish, manage, govern, discover and reuse services within a broad range of applications," he explains.
The new SSR also includes an integrated repository for storing service metadata, and providing additional capabilities such as Web services lifecycle management. "The combined registry-repository serves as a cornerstone for true SOA governance," says Willis.
He emphasises the SSR is intended for use by any organisation that is making use of either ebXML and/or Web services, especially those handling 50 or more services or transactions.
"I anticipate that the SSR will be of most use to Java developers, but it is not restricted to Java environments," says Willis. "This is a registry and will be accessible from a number of different environments, just as LDAP directories are today."
The WSDP (which contains the current SSR release) runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows operating systems and although there will be specific integration between the SSR and Sun's Java Enterprise Suite (JES) suite of products, other vendors' product suites will also be able to be integrated with the SSR.
The final product release of SSR to the market is expected towards the end of the year as a point product, and will later become part of Sun's JES.
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