Exclusive: Infravio brings structure to unwieldy SOA

Although you could use e-mail, wikis, and spreadsheets to govern SOA, such tools leave much of the accountability and control necessary for good governance up to manual processes. Automating those governance tasks requires repositories custom-built to the task, such as Infravio’s X-Registry 5. Without governance, many of the benefits of SOA will be lost.

X-Registry performs yeoman service as a registry and gets high marks for being tailored to tasks of SOA governance. The interface is quick and responsive. More importantly, the product shows the maturity one would expect in a UDDI-compliant registry that’s been through several iterations.

X-Registry stands out in its use of contracts to codify the run-time relationship between the service provider and consumer. Contracts are policies that govern relationship parameters that live in a business context. The UI allows business-line users to manage these parameters and thus govern the usage of services for their business. These capabilities will prove crucial to organizations that want to do more than play around with Web services.

I set about testing X-Registry 5 by installing it on an HP ProLiant server, with 1GB of RAM, running Windows XP SP2. Past experience with Infravio products led me to expect a painless installation, and I wasn’t disappointed. A handy product configuration verification utility checked that the installation and configuration were correct and took care of some pesky details such as setting up endorsed directories for Tomcat.

If you’re familiar with UDDI, you expect a registry to have ways to create and manage tModels (technical models), taxonomies, and categories. What might surprise you is X-Registry’s emphasis on identity and roles. A large proportion of the 170-plus-page user guide is given over to issues of organizations, roles, and users. Because X-Registry is designed to automate governance tasks, identity information is central to how it works.

Users in a provider role publish services and manage metadata associated with those services. Publishing a service is as easy as entering the URL of the WSDL document in a Web form, entering some descriptive text, and hitting Submit.

Service metadata includes schemas, sample client code, documentation, certificates, and other artifacts that are necessary to use the service. X-Registry also supports structured metadata in the form of name-value pairs, called attributes. X-Registry has a standard set of attributes, but users can also add custom attributes. Custom attribute values are typed to enhance structured queries.

After the service has been published successfully, the user has the option of viewing a WS-I basic profile compliance report. When I added a service with a slightly malformed WSDL document, the compliance checker produced a null pointer exception, but the system kept going.

As consumers, users can browse or search for services. Browsing can be done by organization, taxonomy, or service category. Searching can take advantage of attributes associated with services.

After the desired service has been found, consumers can view a service profile that includes basic information about the service, including its WSDL URL, quality-of-service level, locations of any demonstration URLs, and service classifications. The profile also shows whether the service is WS-I-compliant, gives resources associated with the service, and lists any dependencies on other services. Whether a user in a particular role sees this data is controllable through the built-in access control system.

Because human search of registry information is critical, the registry’s capability of integrating deeply with your favorite design tool is important. To test this, I connected to X-Registry from Eclipse using the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Version 1.0. I was able to query services and business units using the WTP Web Services Explorer. X-Registry also integrates with SAP UDDI v3 Client, Oracle JDeveloper 10g, Microsoft Visual Studio .Net Framework, and WebLogic UDDI Explorer.

At the heart of X-Registry is an access control system and a rules engine. The interaction between these two components results in sophisticated workflow management for SOA governance.

Access control is very fine-grained, going down to the individual attributes on a service. Rules operate on roles, service attributes, and other data to manage service access. Rules can be used, for example, to update the access control parameters for a service or modify its URL end point when its status changes from pending to approved, or any other lifecycle event.

X-Registry 5 does not have a UI for its rules engine, but there is a JSR (Java Specification Request)-compliant, developer-level API. Using this interface, rules can be customized to model your organization’s own lifecycle governance requirements. The beauty of rules is that they can be written to apply to any service matching the rule’s condition, enabling consistent control throughout a company’s SOA effort.

Surprisingly, X-Registry 5 doesn’t include provisions for linking to an organization’s identity infrastructure. With no LDAP interface, identity data in the product is an island, unable to respond to changes in corporate or partner directories. Infravio rightly sees identity as the foundation for properly using Web services, but organizations are increasingly interested in linking identity systems together to reduce the management burden.

X-Registry’s price, while in line with other enterprise software of its capabilities, is still too high. I’ve no doubt that large organizations will see ROI from this capable product, but there seems to be an expectation that every enterprise product has to cost six figures to get any respect.

Still, X-Registry provides important infrastructure for managing the metadata about services and for controlling the workflows associated with service deployment, discovery, and delivery. Without a tool such as X-Registry, your SOA governance won’t provide the consistent results you need for reliable and efficient Web services.