Read about the concepts and capabilities of a service registry and repository, and the standards that deliver the value of a service registry and repository in a heterogeneous environment, in this whitepaper.

Introduction

Repositories focused on the needs of SOA environments are typically used to publish, search for and retrieve a wide variety of technical documents which describe a customer's SOA environment. This includes such things as schemas, service descriptions, business process design models, policy documents and so on. These repositories and related tooling products are available from multiple vendors today. These products facilitate various activities across the life cycle of a SOA artifact, such as design, assembly, quality assurance, deployment, runtime operation and monitoring of SOA based applications and business processes. Typical use cases for SOA specific repositories across a SOA artifact's life cycle might include:

For Design Time:

• A designer uses an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) product to design and publish a service description (WSDL) and schemas for a service offering.
• The repository notifies a service developer when a WSDL used by her offering changes.
• A designer developing a business process offering searches for available services to use in defining his business process environment.
• A designer performs impact analysis based on changes in dependent components.

For Run Time:

• A developer tests a design using a repository which contains the correct set of components.
• A design tester is notified when a component of interest is changed in the repository.
• An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) performs a dynamic query of the repository to determine routing based upon meta-data associated with its SOA environment service components.
• A network manager edits and stores updated policies in the repository.
• Automated tooling performs policy enforcement based on policies of record stored in the repository.

For Monitoring:

• An operations manager updates service meta-data in the repository with current information on performance and availability.
• A business manager makes decisions on what services to use based on quality of service information in the repository.

Existing standards do not address SOA repository interface interoperability for the publication and query of documents based on their content and meta-data.

The Specification

The specification defines a SOA repository artifact data model together with bindings that describe the syntax for interacting with a SOA repository. The specification, which is being offered at version "0.9", is divided in to two separate documents, which together are referred to as the "SOA Repository Artifact Model & Protocol", or simply the "SOA Repository" or "S-RAMP" specification:

• Foundation Document
• Atom Binding Document

This architectural separation allows for additional types of bindings to be added later through additional binding documents, increasing the options for standardized interaction with a SOA repository.

The Foundation Document

The Foundation document is the base (common) document for the specification. It describes the data model and a binding independent XML Schema serialization, together with other features which are common to all the protocol specific API binding(s). The Foundation document further defines a profile of OWL Lite to establish a simple yet powerful grammar for users to create classification systems which can be interoperable between repository implementations. Finally, the Foundation document defines a profile of XPath2 to support query operations.

The Atom Binding Document

The Atom Binding Document defines an API mapping to Atom which supports create, read, update, delete and query operations with a SOA Repository. It is designed to maximize the information available to an Atom reader while still supporting the meta-data richness available in the SOA Repository data model. It also defines an XML Schema for the Atom specific serialization.

Get the specification

Resources

• SOA Repository Specification Technology Preview on alphaWorks.
  
  
• Standards roadmap -- understand the impact and importance of standards and specifications for the development of SOA and Web services.
  
  
• The W3C has a great overview of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) specification (February, 2004).
  
  
• "IBM’s SOA Foundation" (PDF, 2004KB, November 2005) gives a high-level view of SOA architecture and offers insight into the roadmaps for becoming an SOA-enabled enterprise.
  
  
• Web Services Addressing 1.0 (WS-Addressing) (May 2006) describes the WS-Addressing 1.0 namespace.
  
  
• Evolving Web services standards for managing system resources (WS-Management Roadmap) (March 2006) outlines a plan to develop a harmonized set of specifications, with provisions for a smooth migration to the new specifications as they emerge and move through to standardization.
  
  
• XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0 (June 2006) offers details on the specification for XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0.
  
  
• Configuration Management Database Federation (CMDBf) (October 2009) standard facilitates the sharing of information between configuration management databases (CMDBs) and other management data repositories (MDRs).
  
  

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