Sun's Service Registry was implemented and tested to provide SOA Visibility. The OASIS SOA RM defines visibility in terms of awareness, willingness, and reachability. The registry provides awareness of service descriptions to help consumers determine their willingness to interact with the service. The registry could also provide awareness of consumer descriptions to help providers determine their willingness to interact with consumers, but one step at a time. Reachability is a run-time aspect of service interaction and is not delt with at this time.

Sun's Service Registry is both ebXML and UDDI compliant. It is available for download as part of Sun's Java Enterprise System 5.

After evaluating ebXML for SOA Visibility, my own conclusion is that it is feature rich and the ebXML specification is well defined to support visibility in a SOA. However, a ebXML registry-repository is complex to learn and develop against. The current JAXR interface will work for one to a few applications updating and querying the ebXML registry-repository, but it will not easily scale to thousands of updates and queries against the ebXML registry-repository. An enterprise software application built in front of a ebXML registry-repository with separate batch updates can solve this problem.

Danny

Last edited by Danny Thornton on 7/25/08 8:10 PM; edited 4 times in total.