News

Sun Releases Beta of Web Services Registry

• By John K. Waters
• June 20, 2005

Sun Microsystems has released an early developer beta of a repository/registry designed to help users locate and reuse Web services. The Sun Service Registry combines an integrated repository for storing the metadata accumulated around Web services with services lifecycle management capabilities.

The registry, which will be part of version 4 of Sun’s Java Enterprise System platform suite, due sometime after the JavaOne conference in late June, is designed to provide centralized access to discovery, use and reuse of Web services, the company says. It supports both the UDDI v3 and ebXML Registry 3.0 Web services standards, and enables customers to “publish, manage, govern, discover and reuse services within a broad range of applications,” the company says.

Sun is a bit behind the competition with this release. Microsoft already includes a basic UDDI registry in its Windows Server 2003. Both IBM and SAP offer UDDI Business Registries. Oracle has its Application Server UDDI Registry. And several smaller vendors offer similar products. Infravio’s X-registry, for example, is designed to provide a single point of access for information about all Web Services in an enterprise. The Systinet Registry, which also supports UDDI v3, is designed to capture detailed SOA service description and usage information into a centrally managed, searchable business services registry. And the Apache foundation has an open-source implementation of the UDDI called jUDDI.

But it’s better late than never, says Gartner analyst Yefim Natis. “A meta-data repository is a key enabling technology for SOA,” Natis says. “It is safe to say that no long-term enterprise SOA initiative can succeed without an integrated and searchable repository/registry.”

Sun cites several key features of the new registry, including “the ability to uniquely define information models and relationships among metadata and help to ensure conformance of published services and content for more flexible customer environments.” The product is also designed to allow customers to manage aspects of Web services to reflect their IT policies and to use event-based delivery of information to support specific processes.

Sun plans to integrate several JES components with the new registry product, including Access Manager for user authentication, Application Server deployer/administrator for managing service lifecycles, Java Studio Enterprise service developer for develop-deploy-test cycles, and a Portal Server for managing WS-Remote Portlet and producer descriptions.

Sun reportedly will demo the new Service Registry at JavaOne. The product is expected to ship as part of the JES R4 release in the fall. The early access version, included in the 1.6 version of the Java Web Services Developer Pack, will be generally available later this month, Sun says.

More information on Sun’s Service Registry is available at: www.sun.com/soa.