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:
Publishing services, endpoints, and WS-Policy artifacts from design-time to the run-time environment using UDDI.
Submitting new services, endpoints, and policies discovered at run-time to the repository to insert a governed approval process.
Communicating service performance information that is deposited into the UDDI registry back into the repository to better inform prospective service consumers and portfolio managers.
Valid Metadata Entities
The following metadata entities are handled by the ALRR Exchange Utility:
All bundled Service and SCA Service types, as well any custom Services of any ALER Asset Type developed by end-users.
Endpoint assets that are linked to the Services that provide access point to the services. For example, there can be multiple endpoints that can be tagged as staging or production and are mapped to the UDDI binding template appropriately.
ALER Categorizations are mapped to UDDI t-models. When a categorization is applied to a Service asset, an appropriate entry is added to the UDDI Category Bag and is linked to the appropriate taxonomy t-model. These t-models are also automatically loaded into ALSR the first time they are encountered, or they can be loaded manually by the Exchange Utility.
WS-Policy assets that are linked to either a Service or an endpoint asset are understood and are published/received based on the OASIS WS-Policy Attachment specification.
ALSM Performance Metrics that are deposited by ALSM (AquaLogic Service Manager) into a service in ALSR are synchronized back to the endpoint asset in ALER.
Service Registration Status and Active Status are added as items to the Category Bag of the Business Service in ALSR when the services are pushed to ALSR.
Example Use Cases
Because ALRR Exchange Utility is bi-directional, it is able to support the following use cases:
When a services in ALSR is modified, such as when more endpoints are added to it (e.g., for staging and production environments), the ALRR Exchange Utility can relate the service with one or more endpoints in ALER because it stores a unique ID for the service in ALSR.
When Business Services are moved to different Business Entities in ALER using asset relationships, the new relationship is also reflected in ALSR when the Services are re-synchronized, again because of the unique ID used.
When synchronizing ALER metadata with ALSR, the ALRR Exchange Utility merges any changes so that performance metrics and other endpoint changes are preserved.
Any two arbitrary Services that were published to ALER and ALSR can be linked using the Exchange Utility. For example, if an AquaLogic Service is published to the repository using the ALER plug-ins for Eclipse and the same Service is published to ALSR using AquaLogic Service Bus, these two services can be linked using the Exchange Utility. Once the Services are linked, they can be bi-directionally synchronized for performance metrics, Policy usage, etc.
The endpoints of matched services can be filtered based on the specified Asset Lifecycle of the endpoints, so that only the matched endpoints are published to the repository. This query is useful when there are separate registries: one that lists the staged endpoints and another that lists the production endpoints.
Related Documentation
AquaLogic Service Registry 3.0 - a fully-compliant implementation of UDDI -v3 and a key component of SOA. The registry provides a standards based mechanism for publishing and discovering Web services and related SOA resources, such as WSDLs, XML Schemas, and XSL Transformations (XSLT).
AquaLogic Enterprise Repository 3.0 - provides the tools to manage and govern the metadata for any type of software asset, from business processes and services to patterns, frameworks, applications, components, and data services.
ALER on dev2dev - Information and resources for architects, developers, and others, including an FAQ and an overview of assembly models in Service Component Architecture (SCA).
