Exclusive: Systinet reins in Web service registries

At the outset, I should admit a bias: I’m a UDDI skeptic. Still, I’m willing to believe that maybe I just haven’t dug deeply enough into UDDI to see its real value. So, I was naturally eager to review the latest version of Systinet’s Web services registry.

Being a UDDI skeptic doesn’t make me a registry skeptic, however. Registries are a mandatory part of a functional SOA for three reasons. First, a registry acts as a “system of record” for the enterprise’s Web services — the registry becomes the central reference for otherwise distributed and difficult-to-find services. Second, a registry is a place where providers can advertise services and consumers can discover them. And third, it’s a point of control for governing the availability of services, managing versioning, and ensuring compliance with enterprise and external requirements.

Systinet Registry 6.0 does all this in a platform that’s mature, stable, and polished.

Registry Basics

I installed Systinet Server for Windows XP Service Pack 2 using JVM 1.5. The Systinet wizard makes installation painless: Out of the box, the registry uses the embedded Hypersonic SQL database to make setup easy, but it also supports Oracle, DB/2, Microsoft SQL, Sybase, and PostgreSQL for production use.

You may use Systinet Registry 6.0 in two primary ways. When developing a new service, developers can browse or search the registry to find services. This promotes code reuse and helps developers find services that are ready for production use.

Alternatively, an application can query the registry at run time to get end-point data for services it uses. In this mode, the product functions similar to a registry in any other RPC-style application, allowing services to be found by name instead of embedded end-point data.

Along with its two modes, Systinet Registry comes with two different consoles: the Registry Admin Console and the BSC (Business Service Console). The first is used to configure and manage the registry itself; for simple installations, it will rarely be used.

The second console is where Registry 6.0 provides real value to the enterprise — and where I spent a good deal of my time. The BSC is the primary interface to the registry for developers, architects, and business users. Using the BSC, you can publish service descriptions and manage metadata about published services, indicating, for example, which are in development, which are in QA, and which are in production.

The BSC also supports the development-time activities of finding services using the console’s search and browse capabilities. As a convenience, users can register for notifications about the services in which they’re interested; when a service has been updated or its metadata has been changed, the user will receive notification either through the BSC interface, by e-mail, or via a custom call out configured using SOAP.

Systinet Registry’s reporting was adequate — nothing eye-popping, but it gives you a good picture of registered services. Reports are canned queries on the metadata associated with services and can be customized.

Replication and Integration

Systinet Registry 6.0 can be used in a stand-alone mode, but many organizations will want to operate more than one registry in an effort to serve specialized needs.

For example, two registries can be run in tandem — one serving as a publication registry, through which developers publish services, and another serving as the discovery registry, through which service consumers find services they want to use.

Used in this way, Systinet Registry 6.0 becomes a key part of an SOA QA program: Services are promoted from the publication registry to the discovery registry through the organization’s QA and certification process, ensuring that only production-ready services are used in applications. Systinet Registry can also be clustered to support replication for geographic dispersion, reliability, and availability. Any copy of a registry can contain all data from another registry or a subset of that data, depending on configuration.

UDDI specifies and Systinet Registry supports a standard SOAP-based API for interacting with the registry. The standard ensures that other products, such as Web services intermediaries, can seamlessly connect to Registry without a lot of integration programming. Naturally, there are Systinet-specific extensions to the interface, and Registry 6.0 provides WSDL for the base API and extensions. Systinet also includes pre-generated Java stubs, but the registry API can be used with any language that supports SOAP bindings. To give you a hand, Systinet provides a set of demonstration programs that show how to use the various features of the registry API from Java. They are easy to get running, and they show coded examples of most things you’d want to program.

A Nod to Standards

Being a UDDI skeptic didn’t keep me from appreciating the strong showing Systinet makes with this version of Registry. The application is rock-solid and performs its work admirably. Systinet Registry supports UDDI Version 3, which was released at the first of the year, as well as Version 2. Version 3 includes a number of improvements to the UDDI specification, including the ability to create more readable keys and to sign UDDI entities digitally.

Systinet Registry goes to great lengths to hide UDDI from the user; unless you’re using the API, you might not ever see it. To use the API effectively, however, you’ll need to understand the UDDI specification and data model, so expect a steep learning curve if you’re not already UDDI-savvy.

Although Systinet Registry 6.0 provides vital services for an SOA, I remain concerned about the pricing of these types of enterprise software products. Systinet’s $40,000-to-$80,000 price tag doesn’t ease my apprehension. High pricing supports big sales commissions, but it puts critical Web services apps, such as registries, out of the reach of small, innovative companies. Still, I’m confident that large companies with a commitment to SOA — and room in their budgets — will find that Systinet Registry 6.0 provides real ROI.