Managing services

WebSphere® Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides a way of managing services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help realize the benefits promised by SOA.

About this task

These benefits include:

Business agility - the ability to change services quickly to meet market requirements
Re-use - to reduce time to value by effectively reusing IT infrastructure and development assets
Resilience - to ensure that IT systems have sufficient resources and deliver their required Quality of Service both at an IT level and at a Business level
Compliance - to ensure that the IT systems are correctly enforcing agreed policies to support both Business and IT governance.

WSRR manages these services by representing them in the registry and associating metadata with them that describes the role of the service in the SOA environment together with its relationship to other artifacts on which it depends. By managing this service metadata, WSRR can provide the single copy of record for service descriptions and thus allow organizations to manage their services.

The ways in which you can manage services are described in the following subtopics:

Classifying objects
The main purpose of classifications is to organize services. An important user task is applying a classification to a concept or other WSRR object.
Managing services by using property metadata
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides a means of attaching metadata as properties (name/value pairs) to service artifact descriptions represented in WSRR.
Managing services by using relationship metadata
In an SOA environment, organizations expect to see reuse and loose flexible coupling between services. This means that it is essential to able to determine what services depend on what other services (or other service artifacts) at any time in the lifecycle of the business applications.
Managing services with XML schemas
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides a single copy of record for all service metadata. In an SOA environment the services are exchanging information in XML formats. To achieve interoperability, different services must agree on the schemas for this information exchange. The industry standard for defining the XML schema is XSD (XML Schema Definition).
Managing services with WSDL service definitions
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) aims to provide a single copy of record for all service definitions in an SOA environment.
Managing services with SCA modules
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides support for conventional service and schema definitions through the use of WSDL and XSD documents. However, these document standards are not enough to describe the dependencies between services that are necessary to support a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA offers the ability to assemble components from existing services either at development time or at runtime. The emerging standard that will allow these assemblies to be described is the Service Component Architecture (SCA).
Managing SCA module metadata
WSRR provides the facilities to create, update and remove metadata for SCA modules and all their derived logical objects.
Managing services with XML metadata files
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) aims to provide a single copy of record for all service metadata.
Managing services with other documents
You can load any type of document (for example: Word, Powerpoint, Visio, or Excel) for which the standard document types recognized by the registry are not appropriate. You can use the WSRR custom relationship facility to relate the document to another entity in the registry, enabling the retrieval and update of the documentation associated with the entity.
Managing services with document groups
Document groups allow you to group a number of service documents together for ease of retrieval.
Managing services as concepts
WSRR provides a means of registering "concepts" to represent services or other SOA artifacts that must be managed.
Loading multiple documents from a compressed file
You can load, in a single operation, multiple documents contained in a compressed file. The documents can be any of the supported types.
Impact analysis
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides facilities to analyze the dependencies between services. This is based on analysis of the artifacts and their metadata stored in WSRR.
Service lifecycle governance
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides a basic level of support for governance in the form of service lifecycles. Organizations can define a lifecycle that their service descriptions will pass through. By managing the state of the service description (the copy of record for metadata describing the service), governance control can be exercised over the service.
Subscriptions
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) provides an extensible notifications framework that allows events that occur to be notified to users and client applications in a wide variety of ways. Although client applications can be configured to filter the events they require, users often want to subscribe to certain events on certain types of artifacts.
Object identity and uniqueness
WSRR generates, for all objects stored in the registry, a unique identification string, called the bsrURI
Managing services by using the web user interface
The web user interface (web UI) provides a default way to use and manage all aspects of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) from a compatible web browser. The web UI is configured as standard as part of the WSRR installation.
Managing services by using the Eclipse user interface
During development, if you are working in an Eclipse-based development environment, you can use the Eclipse user interface (UI) that is supplied as a WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) plug-in to access and search for documents that are stored in WSRR. You can also use the Eclipse UI to publish to WSRR documents that you are developing.