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The following sections describe new and changed functionality in the ALER 3.0 release line.
These features are available in ALER 3.0 RP1:
The ALRR Exchange Utility attempts to integrate ALER (AquaLogic Enterprise Repository) and ALSR (AquaLogic Service Registry) bi-directionally so that the metadata from either of these products can flow in either direction through the utility. The following are the Meta-data entities that are handled by the utility.
The ALRR Exchange Utility is capable of:
For more information, see Using the ALRR Exchange Utility.
ALER integration with Visual Studio .NET 2005 provides users with the ability to easily search for and use assets from the repository without leaving the VS .NET 2005 IDE environment. Assets and any associated artifacts are downloaded directly to your VS .NET solution. Repository Access within the VS .NET solution also provides a view into ALER that enables you to download artifacts and assets from the repository, query the repository, and view the contents of the repository.
For more information, see the ALER Integration with VS .NET Guide.
In a typical Apache Ant build configuration, there is a rich set of metadata available for harvesting. This metadata reflects the software assets that are being manipulated by the scripts, and the relationships of those assets to each other.The ALER Ant Harvesting tasks provide a mechanism by which this information can be harvested from Ant build environments. This mechanism provides for the creation and modification of assets in ALER, through a set of Ant Tasks that make calls through the REX API.
To obtain documentation for this Advanced Edition feature, contact your BEA sales representative.
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is an XML-based language built on top of the Web Services technology stack. BPEL’s main purpose is to orchestrate Web Services in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. Through a set of constructs known as PartnerLinks, a BPEL process can hook into multiple Web Services and orchestrate them towards accomplishing a desired task.
ALER can bootstrap a BPEL file into the system by creating assets representing the business process referenced by the imported BPEL file. Only BPELs conforming to BPEL4WS v1.1 are currently supported.
For more information, see the ALER Automation for Web Services Guide.
These features are available in ALER 3.0:
The Professional Edition places an emphasis on SOA design-time visibility and reuse. The Advanced Edition adds SOA life cycle governance, analytics, and automated workflow. Both editions allow tight integration with other AquaLogic products and tools in the SOA ecosystem.
This edition helps to jump-start project-based work through reuse and support for standards-based application assembly. Documentation for the features in the Professional Edition are available on the ALER site on e-docs.
The following features are new to the Professional Edition of ALER 3.0:
The following legacy ALER features are available in the Professional Edition of ALER 3.0:
The Advanced Edition provides comprehensive enterprise repository for SOA life cycle governance, covering any type of asset and metadata, from business processes and services to patterns, frameworks, applications, components and data services. ALER maps relationships and interdependencies to improve impact analysis. The repository promotes and optimizes reuse and measures bottom-line value. To obtain documentation for the Advanced Edition, contact your BEA sales representative.
The following features are new to the Advanced Edition of ALER 3.0:
The following legacy ALER features are available in the Advanced Edition:
The Advanced Edition of ALER includes the Advanced Registration Flows feature for automating the manual asset registration process. Advance Registration Flows provide a set of predefined flows designed to automate a set of common ALER asset registration tasks, such as asset submission, acceptance, registration, and other governance processes. To accomplish this ALER 3.0 includes an embedded, JMS-based event engine that manages the flow of ALER asset registration events in the form of web service events. These events trigger the pre-defined flows. Once installed, the Advanced Registration Flows can be run out-of-the box or can be tailored to suit your environment.
For ease of use, you can use the predefined ALPBM endpoint or create your own Web Service endpoints to subscribe to ALER events. There are also event monitoring and logging tools for troubleshooting and tuning purposes. For more information on obtaining the Advanced Edition of ALER 3.0, contact your BEA sales representative.
ALER 3.0 supports a standards-based approach to assembling composite applications, which will speed development time and enhance organizational agility. The standards-based approach is supported by enhanced Eclipse tooling.
The ALER plug-in for Eclipse has been enhanced to support application composition and the SCA standard. The Service Assembly Modeler (SAM) plug-in allows developers to view SCA, navigate from SCA diagrams into integrated external endpoints (such as AquaLogic Data Services Platform and AquaLogic Service Bus), and provides a direct link between the assets in the diagram and the metadata in ALER.
There is also a new Repository Access view that replaces the legacy ALER Browser plug-in. The Repository Access view supports browsing, searching, and retrieval of assets from ALER. The browser supports assets that conform to the SCA standard, in addition to assets that already exist in your ALER instance. Both the SAM and ALER plug-ins support advanced searching capabilities, the ability to view asset detail information in ALER, and much more.
For more information, see Repository Integration with Eclipse Using WorkSpace Studio.
The ALER Web Console UI has been completely redesigned in the current release for improved navigation and user interface experience.
The following administrative system settings were added or updated in this release of ALER. For more information about system settings, see the ALER Administration Guide.
cmee.registrar.email.enable) – A new Functional Notification setting. It allows notification emails to be sent to the System Registrar email address when the notification email has not been set on an asset.cmee.new.unapproved.users.notify) – Has moved from Functional Settings: Notification to Enterprise Authentication: General.cmee.show-system-supplied-relationships) – A new Functional General User Interface setting. System-supplied relationships are used for system-specific relationships within ALER, such as allowing for more complex matches when doing asset updates. See System-supplied Relationships.cmee.email.nonuser.cc) – A new Server setting. It allows external email addresses in distribution lists. False restricts distribution lists to only internal ALER users.cmee.tooling.submission.enabled) – Enables logging of import/export jobs controlling asset submissions through integrations with external endpoints.cmee.tooling.submission.enabled) – Enables asset submissions generated through integrations with external endpoints.System-supplied relationships are automatically generated from assets submitted via an assembly model. These relationships show how the internal services and components that comprise a composite application are related. See the System-supplied Relationships section in the ALER Registrar Guide.
In order for users to view system-supplied relationships, they must be made visible by the ALER administrator, as described in the Functional Settings: General User Interface section of the ALER Administration Guide.
Users can create email distribution lists so that the list members are automatically copied on certain email notifications that are generated as part of the asset registration process. Distribution lists can help automate the asset registration workflow because members of the distribution list are notified about asset registration events that the list owner is involved in as an asset reviewer or approver. See the My Stuff: Using Email Notifications section in the ALER User Guide.
The Advanced Search feature in previous releases has been renamed to More Search Options. This feature has also been enhanced to allow extended metadata field searches. See the “More Search Options” in the ALER User Guide.
The following new capabilities are available in the REX API in the Advanced Edition:
AdvancedContainerLogin module to accept user information in SOAP Headers for the AuthtokenCreate REX API method. The username is passed in a SOAP Header with a name that is identified by the ALER system setting enterprise.container.auth.username and has a namespaceUri of www.bea.com/aler. The value of the SOAP Header is the username of the user. If the username is not passed within a SOAP Header then the ALER system setting enterprise.loginmodules.fallbackauthentication is used. If enterprise.loginmodules.fallbackauthentication is true, then the user is authenticated by the configured PluggableLoginModule for the specified username/password.In this release, Repository Hosts are renamed to Artifact Stores. See the Creating and Configuring an Artifact Store section in the ALER Configuration Guide.
A new diagnostic testing tool is available for verifying UTF-8 encoding.
The following workflow-related assets types have been modified for Usage Fees, which has officially replaced Service Fees in this release:
The following elements related to fees are located on the Miscellaneous tab:
The following is a list of deprecated features and changes in support:
This release of ALER supports the following:
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