SOCKET

1 Registry Good, 2 Registries Better

Even though the subject matter is registries, this blog is filed under general rather than UDDI. It looks further afield than UDDI and a step beyond SOCKET to what might come after. To the team, SOCKET has always been regarded as an exploratory first step in the progression to a full-blooded Service-Oriented Virtual Learning Environment (SOVLE).
I cast my mind back to The Godfather when Tom Hagen was replaced as the consigliere to Don Corleone. Tom Hagen was a great peace time consigliere, but no good for war time. UDDI is a fine peace time Web services registry, but will not do for the bloody struggle that is runtime. A dynamic SOVLE in which services and components are being constantly deployed, undeployed, configured, reconfigured and monitored is too much of a war zone for UDDI. There is too much fine-grained and dynamic grape-shot flying around to be serviced by SOAP messages shuttling back and forth to the gentle jUDDI. So who is the Michael Corleone of the registry world? Who can save the SOVLE from runtime confusion and defeat? Jimmy X is his name, MBeanServer is his game. The MBeanServer is a runtime Java registry for Managed Beans, or MBeans. Each MBean is associated with a managed resource. In the SOVLE this will be a Web application or a Web service. These MBeans can carry out the full range of management functions: deployment, installation, control and monitoring. The pairing of an MBean with a SOVLE resource creates the basis of a comprehensive plugin architecture. Every resource, including access control and group management, plugs into the MBeanServer registry through its associated MBean.
Although jUDDI has been retired, she still has important words of advice to give to Jimmy X. Which services are dependent on which others? What might a good bootup strategy be? Which services and components are fit to join Jimmy X?
On their own, Jimmy and jUDDI don't have the power to support a SOVLE.. together they can take on the world.

Posted at 07:39PM Aug 22, 2006 by Brian Peter Clark in General  |