* The SOA repository and SOA registry
Directories, such as Novell’s eDirectory, Microsoft’s Active Directory, Sun’s Java System Directory, OpenLDAP, Computer Associates’ eTrust and many more are the bases for the information that make identity management work – they’re the repositories of the data.
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) was supposed to be the directory for Web services. But UDDI hasn’t caught on as the Web services enabling tool for e-commerce that IBM and Microsoft envisioned when they first proposed the idea.
Now, the folks who for the past five years or so had been beating the drum for Web services have switched (at least in name) to service-oriented architecture (SOA). And, of course, SOA will need its own directory.
What it may get is actually in two parts: a registry and a repository.
Electronic business extensible markup language (ebXML) is the current favorite to replace the decades-old electronic data interchange (EDI) standard for the semi-automatic exchange of business transactions among partners, vendors, clients and customers. The people who created ebXML (a technical committee of OASIS, the organization for open standards) decided that UDDI wasn’t sufficient for their needs and so created another technical committee to create the ebXML registry (https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=regrep).
The SOA people, it seems, have decided that a registry simply isn’t enough, so they’ve added a repository in addition. What’s the difference between a registry and a repository? Ash Parikh took a shot at differentiating them in a recent issue of our sister publication, JavaWorld (http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2005/jw-0425-webservices.html):
“An SOA repository is a persistence mechanism that stores information published to an SOA registry. An SOA registry is a resource that enterprises share to publish, discover, and consume Web services, thus enabling dynamic and loosely-coupled B2B collaboration. Content such as XML Schemas, Document Type Definitions (DTD) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents can be persisted in an SOA repository, which is then used in an SOA registry to enable a subscribe/publish model for persisted services.”
That’s certainly clear, isn’t it?
The SOA repository and registry, the ebXML registry, the UDDI datastore – what they can all devolve to is a standard, LDAP-enabled directory service. Novell even published a UDDI front end for eDirectory at one point. But as UDDI didn’t catch on, neither did the Novell piece.
Still, those of you still involved with directories might want to have a chat with the SOA geeks at your enterprise just to let them know that you’ve got a real whiz-bang mechanism for storing their registry and repository data.
The directory is the backbone of identity management, for sure, but it’s also the backbone for Web services and SOA just as it has been the main enabling technology for the entire network. It’s old technology, it’s not sexy, but it gets the job done. Support your local directory!
