Vendors Vie to Support SOA Registries

NEW YORK – Parasoft and WSO2 are offering increased support for service oriented architecture registries to enhance the governance of SOA environments.

The companies announced their support at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street conference here Feb. 11.

Parasoft offers solutions and services for the software development lifecycle, or SDLC. At the show, the company announced native support for multiple commercial registries with Parasoft's SOA Quality Solution.

The Parasoft SOA Quality solution can query any UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) registry from vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, the company said.

In addition, Parasoft has created an even tighter integration with BEA System's ALER (AquaLogic Enterprise Repository) and Software AG's CentraSite technology. This enables teams to automatically generate functional test cases and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) verification tests at the time the services are published to the registry. This helps to ensure that the WSDL definitions are compliant to best practice and organizational policies

“The ability to ensure that service and SOA design policies are properly and consistently addressed across the service development lifecycle is critical," said IDC analyst Sandra Rogers.

Meanwhile, IDC analyst Melinda-Carol Ballou said, "QA [quality assurance] vendors are evolving their solutions with more focused test creation facilities for services and SOA-based applications. It is also important that they support more integrated testing capabilities across multiple phases of the more holistic SDLC."

Parasoft officials said the company's SOA solution provides an automated infrastructure that enables quality as a continuous process.

In a separate announcement, WSO2, which dubs itself the "open source SOA company," announced the WSO2 Registry. The WSO2 Registry brings Web 2.0 collaboration to SOA governance, company officials said.

The WSO2 Registry combines SOA governance with Web 2.0 collaboration by integrating features such as a structured registry and repository, Web-based interface and Web 2.0 community features such as tags, rating and comments, WSO2 officials said. Moreover, together, these capabilities enable users to store, catalog, index and manage enterprise metadata in a simple and scalable wiki-style model.

With the WSO2 Registry, users can store resources in a structured repository that offers built-in support for common WSO2 Registry that will allow authorized users to comment on and rate resources, as well as see comments, tags and rankings from the community.

“The ability to bring together SOA governance with Web 2.0 community features is central to enabling the social enterprise in which business and technical users work in concert, and IT is driven by the people who understand their needs best,” said WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana.

The WSO2 Registry also provides a REST (Representational State Transfer)-style Web API that allows the WSO2 Registry to be used remotely from any application from any language, including Java, PHP, C++ and JavaScript, the company said. The WSO2 Web API is built on the Atom and AtomPub protocols, which means any feed reader can browse the contents of the registry.