Iona to register SOA services and encourage reusability

Artix Registry/Repository software to promote sharing and support governance

Iona Technologies plans to plug a significant gap in the management and propagation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) with the release today [26 Mar] of software that will allow developers to register services and make them available to colleagues, partners and customers.

Iona ’s Artix Registry/Repository offers a services catalogue and records policies, contracts and dependencies to simplify reuse, help visualisation of service management, and inform audits.

“The industry is starting to understand the benefits of governance in SOA,” said Iona chief technology officer Eric Newcomer.

“Companies will start to view their assets as reusable services they can incorporate in new initiatives. To do that you have to have the service definitions and metadata as they relate to the runtime environment.”

Newcomer acknowledged that Iona is effectively building an approach similar to the aims of UDDI Universal Description Discovery and Integration), an XML-based registry, backed by standards body Oasis and developed from the beginning of the decade. However, UDDI aims have since been folded into other WS standards and the UDDI website appears not to have been updated for two years.

“People forget that UDDI was designed to be this Yellow Pages in the sky of services but it hasn’t turned out that way,” Newcomer said.

“There were lots of difficulties with the data and there was no rigour or effective overseeing. We’re taking services description to the next level.”

Although several IT giants including IBM and Oracle are attempting to dominate SOA, Iona’s independence from database, applications server, development language or other infrastructure could stand it in good stead.

“This is about holding information about the processes and services you’re going to add into your SOA,” said Andy Kellett of analyst firm Butler Group.

“Being able to stress open credentials is important because customers want to know you’re agile and flexible enough to keep infrastructure in place. SOA is about not having to rip and replace because a new generation of technology has come along.”