RollOut: Flashline Registry 5.2

Your architects and business analysts spent months working on a unified customer schema. They've defined a set of services to manage assets that can be reused across your organization. Now you want developers to take advantage of this reuse as they build out service-oriented architecture-based apps. But how do you know that developers are using--not just downloading--the assets you've worked so hard to define?

SOA governance products such as Flashline's Registry 5.2 measure reuse, quantitatively demonstrating a return on investment that is likely funding the SOA initiative. That outlay will be substantial: Registry starts at $55,000, and competes with products such as LogicLibrary's Logidex 4.0, which starts at $25,000 per server plus $1,000 per user.Flashline excels because it integrates into the design-time process. Furthermore, its integration with multiple development environments is unique. Flashline, a JavaEE solution deployed by default on Tomcat, is certified for deployment within IBM's WebSphere and BEA System's WebLogic. Its repository relies on an IBM UDB, Oracle or SQL Server RDBMS. Flashline provides plug-ins for both the Eclipse 3.1 and Visual Studio .Net IDEs, but assets can also be accessed using its UDDI 2/3 interface, a common model for all registry/repository (regrep) products. LogicLibrary's Logidex 4.0, Flashline's main competitor, supports UDDI only as a mechanism to communicate with other SOA infrastructure products.

Like others in this field, Flashline offers a flexible, customizable Web interface and a well-developed search engine for discovering assets. Flashline and Logidex began life as general repositories that expanded to include governance and SOA, but their support for SOA-based assets such as WSDL (Web Services Description Language), XSD (XML Schema Definition) and other XML-related file types is as rich as SOA-born competitors Infravio X-Registry, Sun Service Registry and Systinet 2.

Automatic Cataloging

SOA regreps automatically catalog and validate features provided for XML artifacts. Flashline did its job admirably, producing a clear image of the relationship between a WSDL document and the imported XSD files. This graphic, with which Flashline created an interactive architectural map, let us easily move through related documents. We were able to quickly determine how changing an XSD file would affect other artifacts, services, business processes and the overall architecture.Automatic validation and cataloging help reduce the impact of governance on developers. Most, but not all, XML documents can be parsed and categorized, though some manual work is necessary. Flashline provides a customizable interface for specifying an asset's categories and adapting them to your needs. We found no limits to the amount of customization Flashline allows. That said, Flashline does require manual validation, unlike Sun's Service Registry, which is more flexible and extensible. Sun's model automatically validates executed services whenever an asset is submitted, and determines whether that asset meets organizational standards.

Once configured, however, Flashline provides powerful mechanisms for tracking asset usage, as well as for enforcing component reuse. As with Logidex, projects within the Flashline registry can be configured to contain "must use" assets. Architects can assign a project assets through a compliance policy, essentially forcing developers to use those resources.

Tracking Non-SOA Assets

While Flashline tracks downloads, its plug-ins for Visual Studio .Net and Eclipse also use its patented FlashTrax technology, which generates a unique software ID, to track reuse. The plug-in instruments ANT scripts, as well, so build processes outside the IDE are also monitored for use of assets the Flashline registry manages. This technology even works for assets that aren't SOA-specific, such as JAR (Java Archive) file libraries. After configuring Flashline to manage a specific JAR file, we copied it from an external source and put it into one of our projects. Flashline detected the file's inclusion in our project during the build process and marked the file as a reused asset.

FlashTrax technology also lets Flashline monitor run-time reuse. The mechanism through which asset usage is reported to Flashline differs from the design-time mode, however, and the run-time functionality isn't as remarkable. Flashline, like LogicLibrary, relies on its partnership with many Web services management vendors, such as Reactivity and AmberPoint, which can report back the use of assets governed by Flashline. This lets Flashline more accurately determine reuse across deployment phases.Lori MacVittie is an NWC Senior Technology Editor working in our Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs. Write to her at [email protected].