SOA Software Announces SOA Development Governance Product

Posted by Boris Lublinsky on Jun 08, 2008 12:12 PM

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Last week SOA Software has announced the release of their new Repository Manager 6.0 (previously Logidex). Repository Manager is a service/reusable assets repository allowing companies to effectively manage their SOA and other software resources. Repository manager allows to understand which assets exist within the enterprise, what are their business/technical characteristics and where they are located. Repository manager is part of SOA Software's (integrated) suite of SOA products, including also Policy Manager and Service Manager.

Repository Manager provides the following core functionality essential for SOA Governance:

• Development Governance, allowing organizations to control service production and consumption process from requirement definition to development. understand asset to asset relationships via graphical representation and drag and drop development governance rules to meet the needs of their project or line of business. Repository supports governance policies ranging from a simple, single sign-off approval policy to one that has multiple levels of sign-off and automated validation points
• Strong Federation with Leading Service Registries, including HP SOA Systinet, IBM WSRR and TIBCO ActiveMatrix, allows Repository Manager to automatically synchronize service definitions, metadata and governance states both to and from the run-time environment
• Effective Management and Deployment of Assets supports launching of software artifacts such as executable modules, WSDL files, models and documentation, into the appropriate development tool directly from Repository Manager
• Collaborative Discovery of Assets and Services supports a wide range of searches from simple keyword - based to sophisticated, model-based.
• Support for native federated repositories allows organizations to share assets around the world, while tightly controlling how services are created, viewed and consumed.

InfoQ spoke with Alan Himler and Brent Carlson from SOA Software

InfoQ: Among all the features that this release has introduce which ones do you consider most important?

SOA Software: Repository Manager integration with Policy Manager allow users to automatically invoke compliance policy validations (from Policy Manager) across various check points in the service development process.. Repository Manager integration with Policy Manager also supports full synchronization of service definitions, metadata and governance state between Repository Manager and Policy Manager.

Federation with service registries and repositories reduces the effort of individually governing these platforms.

The embedded development processes in Repository Manager provide the framework for governance and reporting on the status of software assets across various stages of the development lifecycle.

Tight integration with the leading IDEs and SCMs simplifies incorporating Repository Manager into existing enterprise development environments.:

InfoQ: How is custom classification of Artifacts supported by Repository Manager?

SOA Software: Repository Manager uses a patented dynamic asset template infrastructure to enchance asset with a classification metadata (i.e., key/value pairs) describing the asset for purposes of search, understanding or reporting) and relationships to other assets.

InfoQ: Does Repository Manager support validation of artifacts to adhere to enterprise standards, for example naming conventions, content of artifacts, etc.?

SOA Software: Repository Manager combined with Policy Manager’s strong compliance policy engine enables artifact content validation. Repository Manager can be configured to automatically invoke Policy Manager’s compliance engine at various SDLC governance stages, with Policy Manager automatically applying relevant policies and returning results back to Repository Manager for further action. Repository Manager supports both "hard" and "soft" compliance approaches, with "hard" compliance returning the submitted asset to the submitter upon validation failure and "soft" compliance forwarding the validated asset to one or more role-based reviewers (e.g., architects, domain analysts) to determine whether an exception is to be granted or denied.

InfoQ: Does Repository Manager support any artifacts packaging standards, for example, Reusable Assets Specification (RAS)?

SOA Software: LogicLibrary was a sponsor of RAS and Repository Manager is based on RAS.

InfoQ: Does Repository Manager support links to the assets physically located in external repositories, including SCM, document repositories, etc.?

 

SOA Software: Repository Manager supports URI-based, "by reference" link to artifacts stored in any SCMs and other primary systems of records that supports URL-based access. Repository Manager’s AnySource Artifact Adapter toolkit also enables to build access to external repositories not providing URL-based access, thereby enabling "by reference" access to artifacts from essentially any external repository.

InfoQ: Does Repository Manager support customizable approval workflows?

SOA Software: Yes, while Smart Controls comes preconfigured with a development process workflow and suggested check points, customers can configure these processes to meet their enterprise needs.

InfoQ: Does Repository Manager support artifacts versioning?

SOA Software: Yes, every asset and every artifact held by Repository Manager is managed as a unique instance with a unique ID. Artifacts are typically versioned in concert with creation of a new asset version; Repository Manager provides "one-click" support for new version creation including deep copy of all locally managed artifacts.

InfoQ: Does Repository Manager support traversal of dependency tree of arbitrary depth?

SOA Software: Repository Manager supports arbitrary depth dependency tree traversal through both hyperlink-based navigation as well as dynamically generated graphical dependency graph views that can be filtered by both asset and relationship type as desired. All asset and relationship information is also exposed in SQL read-only reporting views to support customer-specific dependency graph analysis (e.g., custom reports developed using the open source Eclipse BIRT Designer and deployed by the customer into the Repository Manager runtime’s native BIRT reporting engine).

InfoQ: How does Repository Manager support notifications of artifacts change?

SOA Software: Repository Manager users "subscribed" to assets receive e-mail or RSS notifications to any changes in the status of those assets (including artifact changes).

InfoQ: Does repository manager support information about service utilization, current service consumers, load, service level agreements (SLAs), etc?

 

SOA Software: Yes via our integration with SOA Software’s Service Manager

InfoQ: When integrating with WebSphere Registry Repository (WSRR), how are custom classifications and custom objects mapped to the artifacts in Repository Manager?

 

SOA Software: Repository Manager binds to WSRR-specified OWL ontologies via its dynamic asset template infrastructure. Automated WSRR federation can be configured into any governance process defined for Repository Manager. When such federation is invoked, Repository Manager provisions bound classification metadata so that objects published by Repository Manager to WSRR are categorized in the context of WSRR’s ontologies. Unbound Repository Manager classifications are published to WSRR as simple properties

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